Top 100 Semple's Quotes
#1. With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.
Cheryl Strayed
#2. You bet your bindi that's how big I want it.
Maria Semple
#3. Earlier this year, I'd told a mother at school I'd been married fifteen year. She asked, "What's the secret to a long marriage?" I thought for a second, then answered, "Staying married.
Maria Semple
#4. Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
Maria Semple
#5. Audrey Griffin's eyes were wild, and she had a big smile as usual, and she was shaking a piece of paper at us. Her gray hair was coming out of its ponytail, and she was wearing clogs, and under her down vest you could see the pleats on her jeans bulging out. It was hard not to watch.
Maria Semple
#6. But you have a vision. You put a frame around it. You sign your name anyway. That's the risk. That's the leap.
Maria Semple
#7. People who don't get seasick have no idea what it's like. It's not just nausea. It's nausea plus losing the will to live.
Maria Semple
#8. 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
#9. I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
Maria Semple
#10. 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
#11. It's a quantum physics concept where everything that can happen, is happening, in an infinite number of parallel universes.
Maria Semple
#12. That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.
Maria Semple
#13. There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.
Maria Semple
#14. How's your day so far?"
"Oh, can't complain," he said. "You?"
"Can complain, but won't.
Maria Semple
#15. 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
#16. I think because I try to keep things as real as I can, or I try to start from a place of reality, I almost don't have the imagination to write a book that's not set where I am.
Maria Semple
#17. Here's something about Mom: she's bad with annoyances, but great in a crisis. If a waiter doesn't refill her water after she's asked three times, or she forgets her dark glasses when the sun comes out, look out! But when it comes to something truly bad happening, Mom plugs into this supreme calm.
Maria Semple
#18. It's great to be able to just go with an idea and not have 10 people in a room telling me why I can't write in a huge mud slide at a school function with 50 kindergartners running around.
Maria Semple
#19. And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.
Maria Semple
#20. I know it's a lot. But she can handle it. I'd rather ruin her with the truth than ruin her with lies.
Maria Semple
#21. I learned that comedy is born out of strong characters. I won't begin writing a character until I have a clear take on them.
Maria Semple
#22. We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.
Maria Semple
#23. On the drive home, I started playing my new flute. Mom never lets me play in the car because she's afraid someone might crash into us and my flute will impale me into the seat. I find that ridiculous, because how could that even happen?
Maria Semple
#24. I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.
Maria Semple
#26. We'd pass icebergs floating in the middle of the ocean. They were gigantic, with strange formations carved into them. They were so haunting and majestic you could feel your heart break, but really they're just chunks of ice and they mean nothing.
Maria Semple
#27. 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.
Maria Semple
#28. 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
#29. Some people, especially literary people, they think, 'I'll write this original script, and it will be full of ideas. I'll submit it, and they'll hire me for television.' That's not the case.
Maria Semple
#30. None of what's become of me was Seattle's fault. Well, it might be Seattle's fault. The people are pretty boring. But let's withhold final judgment until I start being more of an artist and less of a menace.
Maria Semple
#31. In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.
Maria Semple
#32. 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.
Maria Semple
#33. 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
#34. What's this?" She pulled out a card and held it away from her face. "I can't read what it says." I took it from her and read it aloud.
1. Beeber Bifocal
2. Twenty Mile House
3. Bee
4. Your escape
Fourteen miracles to go.
Maria Semple
#35. Just because it's complicated, just because you think you can't ever know everything about another person, it doesn't mean you can't try.
Maria Semple
#36. 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
#37. I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.
Maria Semple
#38. Now that Dad was crying, I was, like, both of us can't be sitting on rocks in Antarctica crying. It's going to be OK, Dad.
Maria Semple
#39. 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
#40. There's a story that during the filming of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola had a sign on his trailer: Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two.
Maria Semple
#41. The world isn't your friend," Joe told Eleanor. "It's not designed to go your way. All you can do is make the decision to muscle through and fight the trend.
Maria Semple
#42. The penguins that spent most of their time fighting were the ones with no chicks ... It's like they're supposed to be taking care of their chicks. But because they don't have any, they have nothing to do with all their energy. So they just pick fights.
Maria Semple
#43. It's what I imagined England would look like.
Maria Semple
#44. 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.
Maria Semple
#45. 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.
Maria Semple
#46. 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.
Maria Semple
#47. When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It's the same as a runner's high. These days, we spend our lives staring at screens twelve inches in front of us.
Maria Semple
#48. We look at babies and we see ourselves, only without all the baggage. We can look into a baby's face and somehow imagine that life will be different for them. That it will be better. Kinder. Free from pain.
Andrea Semple
#49. A live concert needs to be listened to live. Otherwise, it's like eating day-old salad.
Maria Semple
#50. We were quiet for a while, and then I said, "I think my favorite part of Antarctica is just looking out." You know why?" Dad asked. "When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It's the same as a runner's high.
Maria Semple
#52. Was it happiness I'd found in my long marriage? Or capitulation? Or is that all happiness is, capitulation?
Maria Semple
#53. Galer Street School is a place where compassion, academics, and global connectitude join together to create civic-minded citizens of a sustainable and diverse planet. Student:
Maria Semple
#54. Awake! thou that sleepest, arise from the dead! The Lord still lives today. His power has never abated. His Word has never changed. The things He did in Bible days, He still lives to do today. Not a burden is there He cannot bear nor a fetter He cannot break.
Aimee Semple McPherson
#55. I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on YOU to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.""
Bernadette
Maria Semple
#56. Hovering over me was the Chihuly chandelier. Chihulys are the pigeons of Seattle. They're everywhere and even if they don't get in your way, you can't help but build up a kind of antipathy toward them.
Maria Semple
#57. An artist must create. If she doesn't, she will become a menace to society.
Maria Semple
#58. Left to their own devices, women would stop having sex after they have children. There's no evolutionary need for it. Our brains know it, our body knows it. Who feels sexy during the slog of motherhood, the middle-aged fat roll and the flattening butt?
Maria Semple
#59. My favorite kind of book is a domestic drama that's grounded in reality yet slightly unhinged.
Maria Semple
#60. 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
#61. I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.
Maria Semple
#62. 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.
Maria Semple
#63. Maybe that's what religion is, hurling yourself off a cliff and trusting that something bigger will take care of you and carry you to the right place.
Maria Semple
#64. There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
Maria Semple
#65. As everybody knows, being raised Catholic with half a brain means becoming an atheist.
Maria Semple
#66. As for my constant low-grade state of confusion - the Blur is a term that seems to be sticking - let me break it into three categories: (1) things I should know but never learned, (2) things I choose not to know, and (3) things I know but totally screw up.
Maria Semple
#67. I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.
Maria Semple
#68. I don't know if it's possible to feel everything all at once, so much that you think you're going to burst.
Maria Semple
#69. It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson's] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.
Dorothy Parker
#70. Pain I'm good with. It's discomfort I can't handle.
Maria Semple
#71. '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.
Maria Semple
#72. I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.
Maria Semple
#73. Living too long in New York does that to a girl, gives her the false sense that the world is full of interesting people. Or at least people who are crazy in an interesting way. At
Maria Semple
#74. She didn't trust people who didn't like garlic, especially big fried pieces.
Maria Semple
#76. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that's how I fear Canadians.
Maria Semple
#78. don't care where you live, but here in Seattle, our restaurants are better than your restaurants. "Hmmm,
Maria Semple
#79. My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.
Maria Semple
#80. Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
Maria Semple
#81. People like you must create. If you don't create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.
Maria Semple
#82. In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
Maria Semple
#83. Breezy, sophisticated, hilarious, rude and aching with sweetness: LOVE, NINA might be the most charming book I've ever read.
Maria Semple
#84. Maggie Shipstead's prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe. Astonish Me is a treasure of small surprises.
Maria Semple
#85. Her room is full of books by people who have radio hours. It's the gospel according to Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson - American dynamism gilded onto a platform of individual redemption. It's religion as detergent.
Carlene Bauer
#86. Sometimes these cars have Idaho plates. And I think, What the hell is a car from Idaho doing here? Then I remember, That's right, we neighbor Idaho. I've moved to a state that neighbors Idaho. And any life that might still be left in me kind of goes poof.
Maria Semple
#88. When people die, their handwriting dies too. You don't think about that.
Maria Semple
#89. I can pinpoint that as the single happiest moment of my life, because I realized then that Mom would always have my back. It made me feel giant. I raced back down the concrete ramp, faster than I ever had before, so fast I should have fallen, but I didn't fall, because Mom was in the world.
Maria Semple
#90. She's wearing this backpack with yarn coming out of it, so she can knit while she's standing.
Maria Semple
#91. The sky in Seattle is so low, it felt like God had lowered a silk parachute over us.
Maria Semple
#92. I'm not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone's laughing, and then you shake it out, and you realize, 'There's no joke there!'
Maria Semple
#93. But with every step, I felt my anger falling way. Underneath that anger: fear. In the middle of one of her self-help phases, Ivy had once proclaimed that all anger was fear. I'd long since wondered what, if anything, was underneath all fear.
Maria Semple
#94. We live a life of privilege. That doesn't mean we can literally switch off these women, whose only fault was being born in the Congo during civil war. We need to bear witness.
Maria Semple
#95. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, You wouldn't care about what other people thought about you if you realized how seldom they actually did.
Maria Semple
#96. The world will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will inject you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage. What the world is, more than anything? It's indifferent.
Maria Semple
#97. Smell the soup, cool the soup," Timby said. "Huh?" "It's what they teach us in school when we're upset. Smell the soup." He took a deep breath in. "Cool the soup." He blew out.
Maria Semple
#98. 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
#99. You've traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood.
Maria Semple
#100. With God, I can do all things! But with God and you, and the people who you can interest, by the grace of God, we're gonna cover the world!
Aimee Semple McPherson
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