Maria Semple Quotes
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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.
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If I had written something, and I had written myself into a corner, I didn't abandon it. Because I remembered: There's always more.
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I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey.
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My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world.
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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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My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.
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Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.
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My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.
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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.
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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.
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'Mad About You' fit my sensibility the most of any show that I worked on, and as a result, it was really fun. It felt like a very natural fit.
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Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
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This is Seattle. We're supposed to have superior taste.
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Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
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I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.
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I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'
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There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.
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I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.
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On Jan. 1, 2012, I resolved to not buy anything from Amazon for a year.
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'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.