Maria Semple Quotes

The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.

Anything I write I ask myself: Is it true, is it entertaining?

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.

When I'm sitting at my computer writing, I really have this fiendish smile on my face. I am not thinking about the past or the future or how it's going to be received. I feel that I'm very lucky that way; I don't carry that particular anxiety around with me. I'm not anxiety-free by any means, but that happens to be one that I've been spared.

This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.

I'm not too good when exposed to people

I felt so full of love for everything. But at the same time, I felt so hung out there to dry, like nobody could ever understand. I felt so alone in this world, and so loved at the same time.

You come out into the world after a season of TV and you're just swearing and saying mean things to people and they're looking at you like, Who are you? And oh yeah, you think, I have to reacclimate to the way people genuinely treat each other.

Unfortunately Seattle is my muse, for the better or worse of Seattle - I'm not sure.

I can't tell you the number of times I've been in the middle of a perfunctory conversation, and someone will say, 'Tell us what you really think.' Or 'Maybe you should switch to decaf.

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.

I'll see something awful on the street and I'll come home and say to my boyfriend, "I just saw the funniest thing on the street." It's a stance. It's the way I was born, or the way I was damaged.

I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. Im constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline.

Being in writers' rooms turns you feral. You are swearing, you are going to very dark, mean places. You start out in the room with all these smart people, and you're all well-read and well-educated and the humor is really erudite. And then over the course of the year, after the production schedule grinds you down, it is just so mean and stupid.

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.

I spend my whole life trying to put up a front to prevent people from seeing certain parts of me. Weirdly, when I go to write, I feel like I have to expose it, almost compulsively.

My way of looking at the world is that if it is true, it is funny and it is dark. No matter how dark it is, I just think it is funny. I can't help it.

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.

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.

I want find a part of myself that I feel shame about, or that I feel really scared of exposing to the world.

Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.

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

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.

Those East Coast rich kids are a different breed, on a fast track to nowhere. Your friends in Seattle are downright Canadian in their niceness. None of you has a cell phone. The girls wear hoodies and big cotton underpants and walk around with tangled hair and smiling, adorned backpacks. Do you know how absolutely exotic it is that you haven’t been corrupted by fashion and pop culture? A month ago I mentioned Ben Stiller, and do you remember how you responded? ‘Who’s that?’ I loved you all over again.

Can you believe the weather?'...'Actually, I CAN believe the weather. What I can't believe is that I'm actually having a conversation about the weather.