Maria Semple Quotes

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Maria Semple

Profession : Novelist

Birth : May 21, 1964

I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.

Maria Semple

After decades spent in rewrite rooms surrounded by other shouting writers, I discovered that I work best alone. I like being in charge of my time, working out the problems according to my own rhythms and being able to nap.

Maria Semple

I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.

Maria Semple

It's great to be able to just go with an idea and not have 10 people in a room telling me why I can't write in a huge mud slide at a school function with 50 kindergartners running around.

Maria Semple

Some people, especially literary people, they think, 'I'll write this original script, and it will be full of ideas. I'll submit it, and they'll hire me for television.' That's not the case.

Maria Semple

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Maria Semple

I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.

Maria Semple

One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.

Maria Semple

Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.

Maria Semple

It was important for me early on to find the voice of each character and figure out what was unique about them and their individual worldview that I could use for comedy or conflict.

Maria Semple

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

Maria Semple

I'm not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone's laughing, and then you shake it out, and you realize, 'There's no joke there!'

Maria Semple

I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey.

Maria Semple

When I came back from my first TED, very few people knew what it was. But around the time I was sitting down to write 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' in 2010, TED was exploding.

Maria Semple

If you're an artist and you're on Twitter, you are doomed to mediocrity.

Maria Semple

I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.

Maria Semple

On Jan. 1, 2012, I resolved to not buy anything from Amazon for a year.

Maria Semple

I quickly realized that shopping on Amazon had made the idea of parking my car and going into a store feel like an outrageous imposition on my time and good nature.

Maria Semple

We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.

Maria Semple

This is Seattle. We're supposed to have superior taste.

Maria Semple