Quotes by Maria Semple

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

Thats right, she told the girls. You are bored. And Im going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think its boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn its on you to make life interesting, the better off youll be.

And Im going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think its boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn its on you to make life interesting, the better off youll be.

I dont know if its a failure of imagination on my part, but Im 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.

My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.

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.

My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.

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. Thats a big one, the napping on demand!

Theres something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

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

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 dont have the imagination to write a book thats not set where I am.