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
...No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.
I shall pray for your soul,' promised Nessarose. I shall wait for your shoes,' Elphie answered.
The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.
We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...
Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?
The answer of course, is that the clock isn't meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.
When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.
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.