Quote

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.

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
Like
Sound
Romantic
Force
Page
Write
Pages
Hands
Telling
May
Writers
Middleman
Feel
Standing
Middlemen
Feels
Hand
Pens
Writing
Greater
Stands

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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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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 never write a play with an eye to film.
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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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Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.
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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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[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 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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It looks different when you're sober I thought I had twice as much furniture.
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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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There's no such thing as a sure thing. That's why they call it gambling.
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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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The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.
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If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
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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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All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.
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I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.
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Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.
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