Top 11 Gregory Maguire Quotes

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one’s understanding of the complexities of life, and I’m bad at it. I’m slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind.

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.

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