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. – Maria Semple
There’s something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator. – Maria Semple
My talent isn’t so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions. – Maria Semple
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. – Maria Semple
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
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
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. – Maria Semple
My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start. – Maria Semple
If I had written something, and I had written myself into a corner, I didn’t abandon it. Because I remembered: There’s always more. – Maria Semple
I think that’s the most important job of a novelist – to bring authority to their writing. – Maria Semple
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. – Maria Semple
My first novel didn’t sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me. – Maria Semple
‘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
In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There’s so much more freedom in fiction writing. – Maria Semple
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. – Maria Semple
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
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
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. – Maria Semple
I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it’s schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are. – Maria Semple
It was important for me early on to find the voice of each character and figure out what was unique about them and their individual worldview that I could use for comedy or conflict. – Maria Semple
Even when I was writing ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette,’ I started to appreciate Seattle’s many charms. – Maria Semple
I just feel like there’s this illicit thrill in reading other people’s mail and spying on their lives. – Maria Semple
When you become a parent, that’s a whole new level of life intruding. Nobody tells you how boring and time-sucking it’s going to be! Or how the responsibility feels like an airbag going off in your life. – Maria Semple
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it’s necessary for the characters to change. – Maria Semple
I don’t mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that’s something you can write towards. – Maria Semple