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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.

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
Writing
Last
Original
Years
Actors
Six
Life
Write
Actor
Character
Months
Might
Leave
Restrict
Firsts
Particular
Production
Play
Stage
Productions
First
Lasts
Originals

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Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.
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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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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 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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If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
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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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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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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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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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I understand. You work very hard two days a week and you need a five-day weekend. That's normal.
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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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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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All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.
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I never write a play with an eye to film.
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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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