Maria Semple Quotes

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

I'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.

I was halfway through a rough draft of 'The Sisters Brothers' when it came time to start the 'Terri' adaptation.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

I want to wake up one morning and know how to write page one, or page 10, or page 250. But I never seem to know how to do it. Every book is different and takes a different structure, style, process, etc. And relearning how to write is where the insanity comes from.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

You know, I feel like my job is to write a book. Then filmmakers come and they make a movie. And they're two really different art forms.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

Writing novels is the most exciting.