Quotes from Gregory Maguire

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

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 the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realize it is far more common for men to turn into rats.

A man is called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man is a thief or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It's all in which label is able to persist.

I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.

Begging your pardon, sir....One population can't make peace with another by force.

Always the bridesmaid , never the bride." Always the godfather, never the god".

Even God used silence as a strategy.

She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.

Approval is overrated...Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.

I'm a comic writer, in some ways, and a comic person when I'm up at a podium, in order to disguise the fact that in my heart I'm disgustingly earnest.

I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.

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

What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine.

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.

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.

It's unbecoming," she agreed. "A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.

One plus one equals both.

Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life.

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.

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.

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.

I like to think I'm a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.

Yes, I'm nervous. You'll find in time most people are. They simply learn better how to disguise it, and sometimes, if they're wise, how to use their anxiety to serve the public good.