Maria Semple Quotes

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull.

I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell.

The first book I sat down to write was an historical romance. It was really bad and thankfully no one ever saw it.

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I was halfway through my second novel - and I will never publish it, because it's very mediocre.

One bad review can destroy me. It hurts so bad.

I did try to write fiction. I wrote 10 novels. And they were all just awful.

It makes me sad; I had to stop seeing my fans. It is like mental self harm to go and read my DMs.

Actually, I was a little rejected at first. I kind of got slapped down.

Sometimes, the people we invest the most time in disappoint us the most.

Be prepared for negative responses sometimes. It doesn't have anything to do with you. It's just sometimes you're not the right look, or you're not really what they were envisioning.

At this moment I am feeling disappointed with myself and I am hurt and numb...

I kind of dread any kind of critical response, just because it's always painful in some way. Even if it's 80 percent good, it's the 20 percent that's bad that you remember - and that's a higher number than I usually get, 80 percent would be amazing.

If someone down-votes you, or you don't get a like, or someone says something not cool, you project onto it the person or the people who have hurt you the most in life.

Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.

Often our self-esteem is bruised by criticism.

Unmerited abuse wounds, while unmerited praise has not the power to heal.

It just makes it even harder for people to even approach the (open source) side, when they then end up having to worry about public humiliation.

Your heartbreak is just another version of the same old story.

Expectations are resentment waiting to happen.

The plain fact is that she never really liked me, and never wanted me. I had been a mistake; and that, to some extent, is what I remain in my own eyes, to this day. The knowledge never goes, can never be undone. You just have to find a way to live with it.

You're trying your damndest, you strike out and they boo you. I act like it doesn't bother me, like I don't hear anything the fans say, but the truth is I hear every word of it and it kills me.

New York is breaking my heart. I’ve often said that it’s like having a really interesting boyfriend suddenly becoming really, really into wine, and having to have endless conversations about it.

He that tears away a man's good name tears his flesh from his bones, and, by letting him live, gives him only a cruel opportunity of feeling his misery, of burying his better part, and surviving himself.

From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.