Quotes from Alice Hoffman

I could tell people anything I wanted to and whatever I told them, that would be the truth as far as they were concerned. Whoever I said I was, well, then that's who I'd be.

Those women who could read were revered and feared, for they were the most skilled in love magic.

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

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?

When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you.

I knelt by the fire to make certain there were no burning embers left. That was when I spied the tracks of a lion. There were only a few such beasts left in the desert, but one had come here, answering my call. He had been there all the while, watching over me, before he left me at last.

As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.

She had the feeling that if she went home, she might never get away. She thought of birds caught in nets. There was something inside her, beating against her ribs, urging her to do things she might not otherwise attempt. She had the strongest desire to get lost.

There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.

I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.

It was then that Nathaniel truly began to appreciate the years he had spent alone in his room, the distance from other people that had given him the ability to observe and to feel what another might had also made him a writer.

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?