A Quote by 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
I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
There are two different sides of my personality, much like everyone has two different sides of their personality. I mean, it's a profession... It's something that I do. And I'm not Erika Jayne 24 hours a day.
I'm always writing towards a discovery. When I'm writing poems in particular, I'm often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, "I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them." I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem.
There is something to be said for the openness to form, and literary form because it forces you to actually think about the other person, and their motivations, and to try to see them from all sides and to really write about them not as caricature.
I do tend to find when you're playing characters, often - just for the time you're playing them - there are sides of your personality that get stronger because you draw on them more.
I try to find what is closest to me in the character. There's many sides to personality, but it's a matter of, do you entertain those specific areas of your personality, or are you afraid to entertain them?
I said to them last week that I'd like them to win ugly and they certainly won ugly today. That was the ugliest thing I've seen since the ugly sisters fell out of the ugly tree.
Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.
I like to be as diverse as possible. I think the humorous side and the serious side are both elements of my personality. It's what makes me who I am and if I was to neglect either one of those sides and just focus on one of them, it wouldn't be the full spectrum of my personality.
K. Dot was a kid who was trying to find himself in music, finding trends, um, bending towards - ready to bend towards what the industry was telling me to do and after you mature at a certain time in your life, you come into your own...your own niche, your own personality, not only as an artist but as a person.
The desire to be liked is acceptable in real life but very problematic in fiction. Pleasantness is the enemy of good fiction. I try to write on the premise that no one is going to read my work. Because there's this terrible impulse to grovel before the reader, to make them like you, to write with the reader in mind in that way. It prevents you doing work that is ugly or upsetting or difficult. The temptation is to not be true to what you want to write and to be considerate or amusing instead. I'm always trying to fight against the impulse to make my readers like me.
In preindustrial times, the idea of creating something was more related to your personality. Personality was something that you constructed; it's something you had to actively develop and work on. Now personality is something that you have.
The song writing is different because with this stuff, I write it on my own and with Hot Water, we're more of a collective and I love both sides of that. Honestly, it's two different animals but I love and respect them both and feel really honored to be blessed with people who care about it and come out and support both sides of it.
Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them.
You can only follow what's on your mind. In fact, a song is something you write because you can't sleep unless you write it.
I remember growing up and hearing the word "ugly" a lot. "I'm ugly." "She ugly." "He ugly." I hated it then, and I hate it now. I go past physical beauty; I tell people they have a beautiful spirit and that is something different.
I don't believe what the papers are saying They're just out to capture my dime, Exaggerating this, exaggerating that.
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