Top 110 Quotes & Sayings by Maria Semple
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Maria Semple.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
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.
My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.
Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.
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.
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. That's a big one, the napping on demand!
I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.
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.
I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story.
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.
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
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.
There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.
Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
If you're an artist and you're on Twitter, you are doomed to mediocrity.
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.
I think because I try to keep things as real as I can, or I try to start from a place of reality, I almost don't have the imagination to write a book that's not set where I am.
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.
When you become a parent, that's a whole new level of life intruding. Nobody tells you how boring and time-sucking it's going to be! Or how the responsibility feels like an airbag going off in your life.
On Jan. 1, 2012, I resolved to not buy anything from Amazon for a year.
On my walks, that's when the good ideas come. The kind of hard, gritty work is when you're sitting at the computer and it's kind of intense and you're kind of in super control of it - the walks are when you let go. That's when the really big breakthroughs come in, and it's very strange.
I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
This is Seattle. We're supposed to have superior taste.
And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.
I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.
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.
An artist must create. If she doesn't, she will become a menace to society.
I know what it's like to feel snobby; I know what it's like to feel anxiety; I know what it's like to feel like busted because you're crazy.
'Mad About You' fit my sensibility the most of any show that I worked on, and as a result, it was really fun. It felt like a very natural fit.
My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world.
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.
I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.
My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.
I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.
My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.
In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.
When you need a good laugh, do you reach for a book? I don't. I expect books to move me deeply and submerge me in another reality. So when a novel makes me roar with laughter, it's always a delightful surprise.
My favorite kind of book is a domestic drama that's grounded in reality yet slightly unhinged.
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.
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.
I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.
Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone.
We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.
I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.
In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'
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.
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.
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.
I always write authors after I read their books. I've been doing it for years. I write a formal letter and send it to them in care of their agent. My mother always taught us to write thank you notes, and if an author puts themselves out there, they like to hear that their book connected with someone.
In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
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!'
I suppose I could admire all these slow Seattle drivers for their safety-mindedness, consideration for others, and peace of mind. Instead, I'm a fury of annoyance.
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.
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.
I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey.
There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
I drop my kid off at school and then race home, and it's a very limited time. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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