A biography for Maria Semplehasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“An artist must create. If she doesn't, she will become a menace to society.”
“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.”
“I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.”
“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.”
“I just want to hold you close." I gave Timby a squeeze. He relaxed in my embrace. "I'm wild about you, you know that, right?""I know." He smiled up at me."You don't have to be wild about me too. Just try to like me a little more than you do now.”
“There's 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 was a ghost on a ghost ship in a ghost land”
“I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. I'm 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.”
“I suppose I could admire all these slow Seattle drivers for their safety-mindedness, consideration for others, and peace of mind. Instead, I'm a fury of annoyance.”
“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.”
“I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.”
“I drop my kid off at school and then race home, and it's a very limited time. 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.”