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
Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.
And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.' Did she ever come out?' Not yet.
As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.
She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she...
People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.
It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.
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.
My tastes in music tend to favor anything my kids don't like, out of natural antipathy amplified by a sort of malicious glee.
The story of 'Mirror Mirror' is in many ways a story about evolution. It's about the evolution of a child into an adult. It's about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. It's about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.
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.