Gregory Maguire
Gregory Maguire
Gregory Maguireis an American novelist. He is the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and several dozen other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire's adult novels are inspired by classic children's stories; Wicked transforms the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 1939 film adaptation into the misunderstood green-skinned Elphaba Thropp. The blockbuster Broadway musical Wicked,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth9 June 1954
CityAlbany, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn't rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled,...it is Art.
She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands-as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her own way.
So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.
Old Flossie settle down on the other side of What-the-Dickens and dragged some handiwork out of a sack. She armed herself with two thorns shaped into knitting needles. A wodge of curlicued metallic scrubbing pad supplied the threat. 'I knit handcuffs as a hobby,' explained Old Flossie happily, and set to work. 'Idle hands get up to no good, so I like to be prepared in case I meet up with any idle hands.
I thought if this catches on, that would be a sign from God I should move here,
There was much to hate in this world and too much to love.
I hate to be obvious," added the Scarecrow, "but you'd have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren't too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.
Yes, ... It's called 'Son of a Witch.'
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 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.
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 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.
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.
My tastes in music tend to favor anything my kids don't like, out of natural antipathy amplified by a sort of malicious glee.