Life & Wisdom Quote by Alice Hoffman

Hoffman is drawing a boundary line that sounds practical but is really about artistic sovereignty. In an era when every novel is treated like pre-IP, a pitch deck with chapters, she refuses the default industry fantasy: that fiction is just a rough cut awaiting a camera. “I never see a novel as a film” isn’t anti-cinema; it’s anti-translation-as-assumption. She’s insisting that the work’s first loyalty is to the page, not to its hypothetical adaptation.

The key phrase is “internal novelist.” Hoffman signals that her engine is interiority: sensation, memory, moral ambivalence, the slow weather of thought. Film can render emotion, but it externalizes it; it needs faces, bodies, light, blocking. The novel can live in the private corridors of a character’s mind, braid time without explanation, turn a sentence into a pressure system. By naming herself this way, she’s also quietly rejecting a certain kind of contemporary writing advice that prizes “cinematic” prose, as if vividness is the same thing as filmability.

There’s subtextual defensiveness here, too, the kind authors develop after watching their work flattened into plot. Adaptations tend to favor events over interior cause, conflict over texture. Hoffman’s statement protects the novel’s true special effects: consciousness, voice, the intimate spell of perspective. It’s a reminder that the most powerful scenes in fiction often happen where no camera can go.