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.

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

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.

[Puggles] "What population signs on willingly for slavery?" "You mean other than wives?" [Glinda]

Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.

Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.