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