Maria Semple Quotes

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Maria Semple

Profession : Novelist

Birth : May 21, 1964

I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. I'm constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline.

Maria Semple

There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.

Maria Semple

My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.

Maria Semple

My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.

Maria Semple

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

Maria Semple

I learned that comedy is born out of strong characters. I won't begin writing a character until I have a clear take on them.

Maria Semple

My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.

Maria Semple

I never understood the concept of a fluffy summer read. For me, summer reading means beaches, long train rides and layovers in foreign airports. All of which call for escaping into really long books.

Maria Semple

My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start.

Maria Semple

I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research.

Maria Semple

I naively thought I would quit television writing, move up to Seattle, my novel would come out, and then I'd have a novel writing career, and so I found myself really stuck in this very poisonous self-pitying state and felt like I'd never write again. And I blamed Seattle for that.

Maria Semple

I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.

Maria Semple

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.

Maria Semple

I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'

Maria Semple

I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.

Maria Semple

My favorite kind of book is a domestic drama that's grounded in reality yet slightly unhinged.

Maria Semple

If I had written something, and I had written myself into a corner, I didn't abandon it. Because I remembered: There's always more.

Maria Semple

I can only do really serious writing for a couple of hours. And then I always go on a walk. I do a one-to-two-hour walk; I don't go running or hard hiking.

Maria Semple

I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.

Maria Semple

Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.

Maria Semple