Alice Hoffman

Even in times when it’s difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art – and books – always help.

Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it – the information just disappears out of my head.

I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life.

After a while, the characters I’m writing begin to feel real to me. That’s when I know I’m heading in the right direction.

I always quit at three when my kids come home from school so I feel pretty spoiled.

I think secrets often come out. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist and I asked her if there were people who came to her and admitted to doing horrible things and she said, ‘More than you know.’

I don’t really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don’t want to get into someone else’s language when I’m working.

Hawthorne has given us a tradition that some people refer to as Yankee Magic Realism, and I do think there is a certain quality to the landscape that definitely leads into the dark woods.

The adults don’t know what’s happening on the kids’ universe and the kids don’t know what’s happening on the adults’ universe.

I never see a novel as a film while I’m writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I’m such an internal novelist.

Mothers always find ways to fit in the work – but then when you’re working, you feel that you should be spending time with your children and then when you’re with your children, you’re thinking about working.

I don’t think I make much of a distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fantastic.’ They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I’m concerned.

Ironically, now that my children are older and gone quite a bit, I find it harder to work when they’re not around. Too much free time!

You can try to take sorrow and make it into something enduring, meaningful and beautiful. I always feel guilty that this is my job, that I get to do this.

I think growing up is difficult and it’s a process that I’m always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes.

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman’s domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

Any institution becomes a community – whether it’s a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.

I did go there later, but I hadn’t been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them.

I’m much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing.

It was a great escape for me and it was a way to take a break from what was going on in my own world, to go into another world.

Anyway, the sort of love that will not wait is probably best to pass by.

No one knows how to write a novel until it’s been written.

I really feel like the gift is also the curse. It’s always half-and-half. Whatever brings you the most joy will also probably bring you the most pain. Always a price to pay.

I can’t really work on more than one thing at a time.

I’ve been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.

The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her – she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don’t.

All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them – much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are.

They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I’m interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women’s stories are all kind of combined.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers’ works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies – what else is there to write about than love and loss?

Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you’re gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold.

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.

I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there’s a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us.