Maria Semple Quotes

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

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black. ~ Maria Semple

Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television. ~ Maria Semple

don't care where you live, but here in Seattle, our restaurants are better than your restaurants. "Hmmm, ~ Maria Semple

When "Here Comes the Sun" started, what happened? No, the sun didn't come out, but Mom opened up like the sun breaking through the clouds. You know how in the first few notes of that song, there's something about George's guitar that's just so hopeful? It was like when Mom sang, she was full of hope, too. She even got the irregular clapping right during the guitar solo. When the song was over, she paused.
"Oh Bee," she said. "This song reminds me of you." She had tears in her eyes. ~ Maria Semple

The drivers here are horrible. And by horrible, I mean they don't realize I have someplace to be. ~ Maria Semple

So am I. I have stumbled enough. I am forgiven. I am abundant. I am certainly insouciant. I'm not your tar baby. You're the star, baby. Love the lucky well. MARIA SEMPLE wrote for television shows including Arrested Development, Mad About You, and Ellen. She has escaped from Los Angeles and lives with her family on an island off Seattle. This is her first ~ Maria Semple

When I came back from my first TED, very few people knew what it was. But around the time I was sitting down to write 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' in 2010, TED was exploding. ~ Maria Semple

But fear not: I do underdog. ~ Maria Semple

I wish a camera had been trained on me, because it would show what it looks like for a woman to be awakened to the truth. The truth? My lies and exaggerations would be responsible for a mother being locked up. ~ Maria Semple

Everything I'd set out to achieve in this lifetime, I'd done, with grace to spare. Except loving well the people I loved the most. ~ Maria Semple

Life is a stew, and pot is poop.If someone stirred even a teeny-bit of poop in the stew, would you really want to eat it? ~ Maria Semple

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

I got a huge knot in my stomach because if Antarctica could talk, it would be saying only one thing: you don't belong here. (277) ~ Maria Semple

Pain I'm good with. It's discomfort I can't handle. ~ Maria Semple

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

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

The motto of this city should be the immortal words spoken by that French field marshal during the siege of Sebastopol, "J'y suis, j'y reste" - "I am here, and here I shall remain." People are born here, they grow up here, they go to the University of Washington, they work here, they die here. Nobody has any desire to leave. You ask them, "What is it again that you love so much about Seattle?" and they answer, "We have everything. The mountains and the water." This is their explanation, mountains and water. As much as I try not to engage people in the grocery checkout, I couldn't resist one day when I overheard one refer to Seattle as "cosmopolitan." Encouraged, I asked, "Really?" She said, Sure, Seattle is full of people from all over. "Like where?" Her answer, "Alaska. I have a ton of friends from Alaska." Whoomp, there it is. ~ Maria Semple

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

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

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

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

Ollie-O was in a semicatatonic state, uttering nonsensical phrases like "This is not biodegradable - the downstream implications are enormous - the optics make for rough sledding - going forward -" before getting stuck on the words "epic fail," which he kept repeating. ~ Maria Semple

The ghost-walking, the short-tempered distraction, the hurried fog. (All of this I'm just assuming, because I have no idea how I come across, my consciousness is that underground, like a toad in winter.) ~ Maria Semple

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

What was Mom's big crime, anyway?" I screamed. "That she had an assistant in India doing errands for her? What's Samantha 2? It's just something so people can sit around and have a robot do all their shit for them. You spent ten years of your life and billions of dollars inventing something so people don't have to live their own lives. Mom found a way of doing it for seventy-five cents an hour, and you tried to have her committed to a mental hospital! ~ Maria Semple

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

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

To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. ~ 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

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

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's a ritual in which (a) the contractor explains in great detail the impossibility of the job you've asked him to do, (b) you demonstrate extreme remorse for even suggesting such a thing by withdrawing your request, and (c) he tells you he's found a way to do it, so (d) you owe him one for doing what he was hired to do in the first place. ~ Maria Semple

I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me. ~ Maria Semple

Take a picture. It lasts longer. ~ Maria Semple

A live concert needs to be listened to live. Otherwise, it's like eating day-old salad. ~ Maria Semple

I love you, Bee," Mom said. "I'm Trying. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. ~ Maria Semple

My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me. ~ Maria Semple

I conducted an off-site consisting of 25 parents in the Seattle area with an income of $200K+ and whose children are entering kindergarten. The headline is that Galer Street is considered a second-tier school, a fallback option for those who don't get accepted to their first-choice school. Our objective is to move the needle on Galer Street and kick it up into the First-Choice Cluster (FCC) for Seattle's elite. How do we achieve this? What is the secret sauce? ~ 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

But once Violet saw the inheret sadness in one thing, she couldn't stop. ~ Maria Semple

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

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

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. ~ Maria Semple

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

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

There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator. ~ Maria Semple

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

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

Seattle is the only city where you step in shit and you pray, Please God, let this be dog shit. ~ Maria Semple

You want to know the coolest part?" Mom chimed in. "There isn't assigned seating at the dinning room, and they have tables for four. That means the three of us can sit down and if we pile the extra chair with our gloves and hats, nobody can sit with us!"
Dad and I looked a each other, like, Is she joking?
"And penguins," Mom quickly added. "I'm wildly excited about all those penguins. ~ Maria Semple

More relevant was the cover sheet, which set forth the psychological profile of candidates best suited to withstand the extreme conditions at the South Pole. They are "individuals with blasé attitudes and antisocial tendencies," and people who " feel comfortable spending lots of time alone in small rooms," "don't feel the need to get outside and excercise," and the kicker, "can go long stretches without showering."

For the past twenty years I've been in training for overwintering at the South Pole! I knew I was up to something. ~ Maria Semple

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

You know how your brain turns to mush? How it starts when you're pregnant? You laugh, full of wonder and conspiracy, and you chide yourself, Me and my pregnancy brain! Then you give birth and your brain doesn't return? But you're breast-feeding, so you laugh, as if you're a member of an exclusive club? Me and my nursing brain! But then you stop nursing and the terrible truth descends: Your good brain is never coming back. You've traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood. You know how you're in the middle of a sentence and you realize at the end you're going to need to call up a certain word and you're worried you won't be able to, but you're already committed so you hurtle along and then pause because you've arrived at the end but the word hasn't? And it's not even a ten-dollar word you're after, like polemic or shibboleth, but a two-dollar word, like distinctive, so you just end up saying amazing?
Which is how you join the gang of nitwits who describe everything as amazing. ~ Maria Semple

If I'm forced to be honest, here's an account of how I left the world last week: worse, worse, better, worse, same, worse, same. Not an inventory to make one swell with pride. I don't necessarily need to make the world a better place, mind you. Today, I will live by the Hippocratic oath: first do no harm. How ~ Maria Semple

Ten years ago I saw a documentary on the siege of that Moscow theater. After just forty-eight hours of the terrorists confining the hostages to their seats with no sleep, the lights blazing and being forced to pee their pants-although if the had to shit, they could do so in the orchestra pit-well,more than a few hostages just stood up and walked to the exit knowing they'd get shot in the back. Because the were DONE. ~ Maria Semple

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

Let everyone else travel all over the world. What they're searching for in Los Angeles and New York and everywhere else is something I already have right here in Seattle. I want it all to myself. ~ Maria Semple

There's a phenomenon I call the Helpless Traveler. If you're traveling with someone who's confident, organized, and decisive you become the Helpless Traveler: "Are we there yet?" "My bags are too heavy." "My feet are getting blisters." "This isn't what I ordered." We've all been that person. But if the person you're traveling with is helpless, then you become the one able to decipher train schedules, spend five hours walking on marble museum floors without complaint, order fearlessly from foreign menus, and haggle with crooked cabdrivers. Every person has it in him to be either the Competent Traveler or the Helpless Traveler. Because Joe is so clearheaded and sharp, I've been able to go through life as the Helpless Traveler. Which, now that I think about it, might not be such a good thing. It's a question for Joe. His ~ Maria Semple

Judging from the contents of her shopping cart - imported cheese, organic raspberries, fruit wash spray - she is the exact quality of parent we need at Galer Street. I saw her in the parking lot. She was driving a Lexus. Not a Mercedes, but close enough! Did ~ Maria Semple

The most random things get her way too full of love ~ Maria Semple

There was no relief deeper than being loved by the person who'd known you the longest. ~ Maria Semple

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

All you can do when it comes to ferries is get in line and hope. ~ Maria Semple

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

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

People say Seattle is one of the toughest cities in which to make friends. They even have a name for it, the 'Seattle freeze'. ~ 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 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

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing. ~ 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 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

Haldol is an antipsychotic." He dropped his reading glasses into his shirt pocket. "It was used in the Soviet prison system to break prisoners' wills." "And I'm only discovering it now?" I said. ~ 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

There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without. ~ Maria Semple

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

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

If you truly believed you had a benevolent bus driver, and you were certain he was taking you somewhere good, you could just settle in and appreciate the ride. ~ 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

Know what one of the guys at the drive-through Starbucks has on his forearm?" Bernadette said. "A paper clip! It used to be so daring to get a tattoo. And now people are tattooing office supplies on their bodies. ~ 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

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. ~ Maria Semple

There's a saying,' Dad said. 'When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras ... ' 'YOU look for horses,' I said. 'While you spent your whole life at work, me and Mom were having the best, funnest time ever. Mom and I lived for each other. She wouldn't do anything CLOSE to getting drunk and walking next to a ship's balcony because it would mean she might never see me again. That you think she would shows how little you know her. YOU look for horses, Dad. ~ Maria Semple

Parking in Seattle is an eight-step process. Step one, find a place to park (gooood luuuuck!). Step two, back into the angled parking space (who ever innovated that should be sentenced to the chokey). ~ Maria Semple

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

Actually, I bite the Milk Duds into four pieces and spit them back into the popcorn so they're smaller, giving me a better popcorn-to-Milk-Dud ratio. Yes, they're covered in saliva, but it's my saliva. Though I can see how, to someone reaching into the popcorn he said he wasn't going to eat, it could be an issue. ~ Maria Semple

In order to make the April mortgage, Kurt had been forced to sell all his CDs, disconnect his Internet, and never set foot in a Jamba Juice. ~ Maria Semple

I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey. ~ Maria Semple

Have you ever heard that the brain is a discounting mechanism? ~ Maria Semple

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics. ~ Maria Semple

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

I asked Joe if he hated Ivy and Bucky. He said, "That would make as much sense as hating a rattlesnake. You don't hate rattlesnakes; you avoid them. ~ Maria Semple

How do I break it to you that people aren't predictable? That life is confounding and sadistic in its cruelty? That when things go your way, it never makes you as happy as you'd expected, but when things go against you, it's a cold-water jolt, an unshakable outrage that dogs you forever. ~ 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

You've traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood. ~ Maria Semple

Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass - anything and everything - the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that's how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don't understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such. ~ Maria Semple

You try your best, or you don't try your best. The mountains don't care. ~ Maria Semple

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