Maria Semple People Quotations

My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.

I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global "connectitude." (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)

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.

I'm not too good when exposed to people