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

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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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I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.
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There's no such thing as a sure thing. That's why they call it gambling.
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If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
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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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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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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 use computers... I'm someone who needs to see the page right away in my hand.
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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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Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count.
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It looks different when you're sober I thought I had twice as much furniture.
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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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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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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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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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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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