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

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If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
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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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[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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The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.
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Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.
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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 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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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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I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.
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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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Once you've opened yourself up, it's best to go all the way.
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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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Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.
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There's no such thing as a sure thing. That's why they call it gambling.
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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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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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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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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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