Maria Semple Quotes
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
Quotes to Explore
I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.
Maria Semple
The one constant in my life has been my love of books: reading them, thinking about them, talking about them, holding them, turning people on to new ones.
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
In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
Maria Semple
I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.
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
I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.
Maria Semple
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.
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 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 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.
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
