- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
Maria Semple Quotes
Most Famous Maria Semple Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
- Mad
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- Nov 07, 2020
'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.
- I Am
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Job
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.
- Alone
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- Nov 07, 2020
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!
- Freedom
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- Nov 07, 2020
I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. I'm constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.
- Freedom
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- Nov 07, 2020
In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.
- Character
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nov 07, 2020
My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
I never understood the concept of a fluffy summer read. For me, summer reading means beaches, long train rides and layovers in foreign airports. All of which call for escaping into really long books.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start.
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Myself
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- Nov 07, 2020
I naively thought I would quit television writing, move up to Seattle, my novel would come out, and then I'd have a novel writing career, and so I found myself really stuck in this very poisonous self-pitying state and felt like I'd never write again. And I blamed Seattle for that.
- Mind
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- Nov 07, 2020
I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
- Crazy
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- Nov 07, 2020
I know what it's like to feel snobby; I know what it's like to feel anxiety; I know what it's like to feel like busted because you're crazy.
- Nov 07, 2020
In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
- Blown Away
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Drama
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- Nov 07, 2020
My favorite kind of book is a domestic drama that's grounded in reality yet slightly unhinged.
- Always
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Go
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Everyone
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.
- Peace
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Hands
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- Nov 07, 2020
There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
- Go
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- Nov 07, 2020
Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.
- Alone
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Itself
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- Nov 07, 2020
I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.
- Go
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Some people, especially literary people, they think, 'I'll write this original script, and it will be full of ideas. I'll submit it, and they'll hire me for television.' That's not the case.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Complexity
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- Nov 07, 2020
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
- Exhilarating
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- Nov 07, 2020
One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.
- Myself
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Important
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- Nov 07, 2020
It was important for me early on to find the voice of each character and figure out what was unique about them and their individual worldview that I could use for comedy or conflict.
- Care
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- Nov 07, 2020
I always write authors after I read their books. I've been doing it for years. I write a formal letter and send it to them in care of their agent. My mother always taught us to write thank you notes, and if an author puts themselves out there, they like to hear that their book connected with someone.
- Joke
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- Nov 07, 2020
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!'
- Conference
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- Nov 07, 2020
I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
When I came back from my first TED, very few people knew what it was. But around the time I was sitting down to write 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' in 2010, TED was exploding.
- Pain
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- Nov 07, 2020