I've always assumed that if you have lots of quality links pointing to your homepage, that will also help your internal pages in the SERPS. But maybe I assume too much. Is it certain that a quality link pointing to www.example.com will also indirectly help www.example.com/page in the SERPS? Thanks.
The good linking structure of the site will enter regarding this and will surely help pass PR juice, crawl and index the entire site. But it is still better if you want to rank well internal sites, give them their own backlinks from external sites.
a gud link structuer helps you in gaining gud page rank and also helps you in indexing your inner pages.
As backlinks helps to improve a site ranking, the internal pages also get affected as they are part of the site. So backlinks to homepage help internal pages too. You can also build backlinks for internal pages. They will help more.
No, what you heard is unfortunately not true. But, backlinks to your internal pages will help the ranking of those internal pages.
And even more. If you have only links to your homepage Google may think this to me strange, unnatural. It may mean that your inner pages are useless.