Art & Creativity Quote by Alice Hoffman

Hoffman’s move here is a quiet reversal of the way readers like to talk about fiction: not as a parade of invented people, but as a kind of self-portrait in disguise. She acknowledges the obvious defense - imagined characters, not autobiographical confession - then slips in the more intimate truth: invention is still filtered through the author’s temperament, fears, fixations, and private sense of justice. The phrase “a bit of who I am” is modest on its face, but it’s also a claim of authorship as exposure. Even when she’s writing witches, lovers, outcasts, or the grief-struck, the emotional DNA traces back to one origin.

The dream comparison is the real engine. It doesn’t just make the point clearer; it recruits the reader into the same psychological framework. In dreams, you don’t merely watch characters; you generate them. Hoffman is nudging us to see reading the same way: we treat fictional people as separate entities, yet our attachment often reveals more about our inner life than the book’s plot does. Her subtext is almost therapeutic: if you’re moved, repelled, or obsessed, that response is diagnostic.

Contextually, it fits a writer known for emotional realism inside heightened premises. It also defuses the perennial gotcha question - “Which character is you?” - by answering: all of them, in fragments, because the self isn’t a single stable narrator. It’s a cast.