Maria Semple Quotes
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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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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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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 not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone's laughing, and then you shake it out, and you realize, 'There's no joke there!'
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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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I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.
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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 think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.
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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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Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
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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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On Jan. 1, 2012, I resolved to not buy anything from Amazon for a year.
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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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This is Seattle. We're supposed to have superior taste.
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There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.
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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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Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
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I suppose I could admire all these slow Seattle drivers for their safety-mindedness, consideration for others, and peace of mind. Instead, I'm a fury of annoyance.
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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.
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I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'