Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless you're really depressed or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent, a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful.
Gregory Maguire
I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.
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'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.
When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.
While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon.
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.
I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.
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 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 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.
My tastes in music tend to favor anything my kids don't like, out of natural antipathy amplified by a sort of malicious glee.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 actually prefer female voices to listen to, mostly, but among the male singers whose voices I like are Jeff Buckley, Art Garfunkel, that sort of voice. Contemporary crooners rather than rockers.
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.
