Alice Hoffman

“I could hardly get a boy to look at me. All right, they'd look, they'd even take me out, but no one asked for a second date. I was too nasty, a real wise guy, and all the boys could tell wha...”

“Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring the...”

“He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.”

“Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other people's houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother.”

“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 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.”

“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...”

“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.”

“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...”

“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...”

“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'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.”

“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.”