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

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All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.
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There's no such thing as a sure thing. That's why they call it gambling.
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If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet.
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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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Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.
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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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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 much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.
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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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Sports is the only entertainment where, no matter how many times you go back, you never know the ending.
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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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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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Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.
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The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.
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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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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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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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