Gregory Maguire Quotes

I do love to sing. Had I a longer set of thigh bones and a sweeter voice, I should have loved to be a performer.

I was just about to begin writing ‘Mirror Mirror’, within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.

When I began ‘Wicked‘, I really thought of it entirely as a one-off, as the English say. There was no intention that there should ever be a follow up, because the subtitle was ‘The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West‘. She was dead and gone, as the book says, at the end.

While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon.

My tastes in music tend to favor anything my kids don’t like, out of natural antipathy amplified by a sort of malicious glee.

My first job was scooping ice cream at Friendly‘s in Albany, New York. I hated the work, most of my colleagues, and the uniform, and I more or less lost my taste for ice cream permanently.

I didn’t even realize this at first, but there’s almost no central character in any of my 24 books who doesn’t have a dead mother or a lost parent.

In a sense, ‘Out of Oz’ is an examination of how individuals keep going, keep reinventing themselves and their lives, even after life-altering complications have afflicted them.

I had written children‘s books for 14 years before I published ‘Wicked.’ And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless you’re really depressed or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent, a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful.

I’m not a writer because I want to make money. I’m a writer because I’m a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories.