Quotes from Maria Semple

When I graduated high school, I was one of many English-majors-to-be traveling through Europe with a copy of 'Let's Go Europe' in one hand, 'Anna Karenina' in the other, a Eurail pass for a bookmark.

I know it's a lot. But she can handle it. I'd rather ruin her with the truth than ruin her with lies.

My favorite kind of book is a domestic drama that's grounded in reality yet slightly unhinged.

We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.

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.

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.

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

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.

I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.

The one constant in my life has been my love of books: reading them, thinking about them, talking about them, holding them, turning people on to new ones.

If you're an artist and you're on Twitter, you are doomed to mediocrity.

I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'

I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

I must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it's because I'm a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out.

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

Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two.

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.