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
amazon car good imposition nature outrageous parking quickly realized shopping store time
I quickly realized that shopping on Amazon had made the idea of parking my car and going into a store feel like an outrageous imposition on my time and good nature.
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.
famous pick
My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.
computer good gritty ideas intense sitting super walks work
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.
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.