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

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I never write a play with an eye to film.
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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 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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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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Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.
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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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Once you've opened yourself up, it's best to go all the way.
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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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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 understand. You work very hard two days a week and you need a five-day weekend. That's normal.
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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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Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count.
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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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If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
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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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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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Sports is the only entertainment where, no matter how many times you go back, you never know the ending.
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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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