“That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.”
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Alice Hoffman 85
Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer 1952Related quotes

“I can imagine no greater bliss than to lie about, reading novels all day.”
Source: Ten Things I Love About You

'Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo's Undisclosed Underworld' by David Remnick, The New Yorker, September 15, 1997
These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 13
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)
“Who now reads novels as a guide to life and love? Everyone wants to star in his or her own movie.”
Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2001 ed.): Art. "Frederic Raphael", p. 363

“Characters in novels are all fiction like the world they live in.”
Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse (2013)
Context: Characters in novels are all fiction like the world they live in. Of course Vivien Lash has things in common with me but if she actually was me I wouldn’t have been able to invent her. And I’m not plotting to murder my husband!
The closest connection between me and my characters is that we live in a city that’s recognisable as London, but it’s a version of London that came out of my head.

A modern novelist of Dickensian tradition, Spotlight, Russia Today, January 24, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ost0Gyl2V1I,
"Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
Crash (1973)
Context: We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.