Maria Semple Quotes
In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.
Quotes to Explore
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So people think I'm lying about my age all the time? It's the records that are wrong. I've never told anyone how old I am. The minute they ask me, I say 'That's none of your business.' So that means I've never once lied about my age. Now that's true!
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One can never know enough. The unknown and its call lies even in what we know.
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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it's like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful.
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There's no regrets for me.
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What people don't appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls. Most humans probably couldn't manage it, and they've had a lifetime of practice at walking without falling over.
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It goes without saying that it's hard to attain a certain level of success.
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It was a small provincial place with great people and I had a happy childhood growing up in Queens.
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Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.
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I am happy that I have entertained people and made them happy.
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VR is going to become something mainstream, but it's not going to happen right away. You just don't have the horsepower to make it happen on a device, much less a cheap enough and comfortable enough device that a normal consumer is going to want to have.
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I never believed I was the best fighter in the world.
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The challenge with 'Watchmen' is making sure that the ideas that were in the book got into the movie. That was my biggest stretch. I wanted people to watch the movie and get it. It's one of those things where, over time, it has happened more.
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Personal responsibility is not only recognizing the errors of our ways. Personal responsibility lies in our willingness and ability to correct those errors individually and collectively.
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America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
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Using MO to link crimes can be problematic.
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Keratin can be very colorful, as we see in birds. We'd expect dinosaurs to be very colorful because they basically invented the characteristics we see in birds.
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One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
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Religion is a matter of the heart. No physical inconvenience can warrant abandonment of one's own religion.
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The older I get, the more interest I have in writing other kinds of music.
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Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.
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I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.
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When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. . . .When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have e made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
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My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don't see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity.
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In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.
