Maria Semple Quotes

• 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

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  Tags in Ideas, Intense

• 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

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  Tags in Reality, Book

• 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

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  Tags in Specific, Time

• 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.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Escaping, Summer

• 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.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Plot

• 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

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  Tags in School

• There’s a happiness that comes from writing that I won’t live without.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Happiness, Live

• 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

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  Tags in Nap, Surrounded

• Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Television, Learned

• My talent isn’t so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Smart, Smart People

• My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Strength, Writer

• My first novel didn’t sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Humiliating

• ‘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.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Mad

• My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world.

  Maria Semple

  Topics in Father

  Tags in World

• In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Plot

• In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There’s so much more freedom in fiction writing.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Freedom, Writing

• I think that’s the most important job of a novelist – to bring authority to their writing.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Authority, Hard Work

• 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.

  Maria Semple

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  Tags in Character, Strong

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Good, Writing

• An artist must create. If she doesn’t, she will become a menace to society.

  Maria Semple

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Become, She

Maria Semple (20)

Birth:	1964
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Screenwriter, Television Producer, Writer

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• 1955 - Kevin Patrick Brady
• 1935 - Richard Berry
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• 1862 - William Wallace Campbell

Deaths

• 1987 - Primo Levi
• 1974 - Abraham Robinson
• 1985 - Susan Ertz
• 2012 - Ahmed Ben Bella
• 1916 - Richard Harding Davis