Maria Semple Quotes

“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

“One of the main reasons I don't like leaving the house is because I might find myself face to face with a Canadian.”

— Maria Semple

I'd say I never considered myself a great architect. I'm more of a creative problem solver with good taste and a soft spot for logistical nightmares.

— Maria Semple

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

Its like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle into a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won't matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.

— Maria Semple

“We were like the Beatles, Dad.'
'I know you think that, sweetie'
'Seriously. Mom is John, you're Paul, I'm George, and Ice Cream is Ringo.'
'Ice Cream,' I said. 'Resentful of the past, fearful of the future ... everytime we saw Ice Cream sitting there with her mouth open, we'd say, Poor Ice Cream, resentful of the past, fearful of the future.”

— Maria Semple

“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

“People like you must create. If you don't create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.”

— Maria Semple

The first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station.

— Maria Semple

“The sky in Seattle is so low, it felt like God had lowered a silk parachute over us.”

— Maria Semple

All those people I didn't even know, I couldn't pick them out of a lineup if I had to, but they had worked their whole lives to get the knowledge that ended up saving my life. It was because of them that I was in this magnificent wave of people and music.

— Maria Semple

“How do Mercedes Parents think? My research indicates the following:
1. The choice of private schools is both fear-based and aspirational. Mercedes Parents are afraid their children won't "the best education possible," Which has nothing to do with actual education and everything to do with the number of other Mercedes Parents at a school.”

— Maria Semple

“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

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

“All you need to know about Antarctica is it's three horizontal stripes. On the bottom, there's the stripe for the water, which is anywhere from black to dark gray. And on top of that, there's a stripe for the land, which is usually black or white. Then there's a stripe for the sky, which is some kind of gray or blue.”

— Maria Semple

“So why didn't I switch schools? The other good schools I could have sent Bee to ... well, to get to them, I'd have to drive past a Buca di Beppo. I hated my life enough without having to drive past a Buca di Beppo four times a day.”

— Maria Semple

“All you can do when it comes to ferries is get in line and hope.”

— Maria Semple

“But once Violet saw the inheret sadness in one thing, she couldn't stop.”

— Maria Semple

“Take a picture. It lasts longer.”

— Maria Semple

“I love you, Bee," Mom said. "I'm Trying. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.”

— Maria Semple

“The sight of Elgie flat on the slimy dock, groaning "My wife, my wife", with a gun pointed at him, and me jumping up and down, was even enough for a German to take pity.”

— Maria Semple

“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

“It's a quantum physics concept where everything that can happen, is happening, in an infinite number of parallel universes.”

— Maria Semple

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

— Maria Semple

“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

“There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.”

— 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

“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

Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone.

— Maria Semple

“There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.”

— 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

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

“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

Both 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' and my first novel, 'This One is Mine,' are pretty complex on a story level, and fun reads as a result.

— Maria Semple

“Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.”

— Maria Semple

“I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey.”

— 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

“I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.”

— Maria Semple

“I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.”

— 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

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

— Maria Semple

“My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.”

— Maria Semple

'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Breezy, sophisticated, hilarious, rude and aching with sweetness: LOVE, NINA might be the most charming book I've ever read.”

— Maria Semple