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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.

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
Simply
Wonderful
Book
Handler
Come
Evan
Life
Pulls
Close
Friend
Inside

More quotes by Neil Simon

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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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[When you write a play] you walk into a forest without a knife, without a compass. But . . . if you have a sense of geography, you find that you're clearing a path and getting to the right place.
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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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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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I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.
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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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Talent is the gift plus the passion - a desire to succeed so intense that no force on earth can stop it.
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There's no such thing as a sure thing. That's why they call it gambling.
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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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I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.
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If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
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I never write a play with an eye to film.
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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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If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet.
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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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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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Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count.
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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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It looks different when you're sober I thought I had twice as much furniture.
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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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