Top 45 Maria Semple Quotes

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

I think that’s the most important job of a novelist – to bring authority to their writing.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

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

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

‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’ is an epistolary novel – one told in letters. I had no idea how much fun it would be, puzzling together the plot with letters and documents.

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

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 must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it’s because I’m a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world.

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.

Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.

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.

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.

‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’ was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.