Maria Semple Quotes
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There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
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My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.
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And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.
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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.
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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.
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'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.
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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.
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An artist must create. If she doesn't, she will become a menace to society.
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My favorite kind of book is a domestic drama that's grounded in reality yet slightly unhinged.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone.
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We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.
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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.
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If you're an artist and you're on Twitter, you are doomed to mediocrity.
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I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.
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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.
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My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.
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Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.