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If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.

Neil Simon

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Neil Simon
Age: 91 †
Born: 1927
Born: July 4
Died: 2018
Died: August 26
Entrepreneur
Film Producer
Librettist
Lyricist
Playwright
Screenwriter
New York City
New York
Marvin Neil Simon
Took
Motivational
Risk
Ever
Sistine
Would
Painted
Risks
Floor

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Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.
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I don't like dating or just living with a woman. I like to create a relationship, a marriage. And almost all of my marriages have involved children, so I'm really a family man as well.
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Sports is the only entertainment where, no matter how many times you go back, you never know the ending.
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I go to see plays all the time, and whenever I see Chekhov, I'm amazed at how this Russian play strikes home to me living 100 years later in New York City. I'm drawn to him because of his way with characters and their relationships with each other.
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I don't want to restrict the life of a play to a particular production. The original actors might leave after the first six months, and I want the play to last 30 or 40 years. You write for the character, not the actor on the stage.
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All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.
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Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball.
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Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.
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I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.
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Evan Handler's new book is simply wonderful. He pulls you inside his life, and you come out his very close friend.
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You get attached to the way you write, and I'm attached to notebooks. That's where I really write the plays. Just two or three pages at a time, then I transfer to the typewriter and rewrite while I type.
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There's no such thing as a sure thing. That's why they call it gambling.
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Once you've opened yourself up, it's best to go all the way.
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I never write a play with an eye to film.
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I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.
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It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.
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If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet.
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I feel like writing about a time when I was probably, and think all of us are, the happiest before the obligations start in.
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A lot of your personality is formed before you're 12, obviously, but only a few of my plays use characters from my childhood. The more mature plays are affected only by my adult experiences.
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Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.
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