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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.

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
Experiences
Adults
Childhood
Formed
Characters
Mature
Personality
Adult
Use
Affected
Character
Plays
Play
Obviously

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The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.
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He's too nervous to kill himself. He wears his seat belt in a drive-in movie.
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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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All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.
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Once you've opened yourself up, it's best to go all the way.
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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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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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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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It looks different when you're sober I thought I had twice as much furniture.
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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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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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Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count.
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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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I love living. I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far.
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If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
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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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I never write a play with an eye to film.
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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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I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.
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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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