Quote

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.

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
Time
Type
Rewrite
Write
Typewriters
Three
Transfer
Two
Transfers
Play
Notebook
Writing
Attached
Really
Plays
Notebooks
Way
Pages
Typewriter

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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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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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If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet.
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I never write a play with an eye to film.
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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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Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.
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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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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 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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He's too nervous to kill himself. He wears his seat belt in a drive-in movie.
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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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Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count.
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Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.
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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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I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.
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It looks different when you're sober I thought I had twice as much furniture.
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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 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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