Maria Semple
Maria Semple
Maria Keogh Semple is an American novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of This One Is Mineand Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Her television credits include Beverly Hills, 90210, Mad About You, Saturday Night Live, Arrested Development, Suddenly Susan and Ellen...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth17 June 1964
CountryUnited States of America
art courage creating stand takes time
Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone.
couple hard running
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.
fun letters novel plot puzzling together
'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.
blamed felt found move novel poisonous seattle state stuck
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.
happiness
There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.
books deeply delightful expect good move novel reach roar
When you need a good laugh, do you reach for a book? I don't. I expect books to move me deeply and submerge me in another reality. So when a novel makes me roar with laughter, it's always a delightful surprise.
finding people
My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.
business local preserve
We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.
bunk reading room survived tolstoy youth
I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.
room sideways spent time
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.
shocking
My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.
character characters consistent growth narrative needed reason remain week wrote
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.
amazon buy resolved
On Jan. 1, 2012, I resolved to not buy anything from Amazon for a year.
famous pick
My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.