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I never write a play with an eye to film.

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
Film
Play
Writing
Never
Eye
Write

More quotes by Neil Simon

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I don't use computers... I'm someone who needs to see the page right away in my hand.
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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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Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.
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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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[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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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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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 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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Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.
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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 understand. You work very hard two days a week and you need a five-day weekend. That's normal.
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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 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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All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.
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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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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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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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The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.
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