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
couple drop hard home kid limited race running school serious time
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.
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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.
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Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'
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.
thrill
I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.
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I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.
mind
I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
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I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey.
Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.