Quote

[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.

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
Sense
Knives
Place
Forest
Find
Forests
Without
Walk
Play
Walks
Clearing
Right
Path
Geography
Writing
Getting
Knife
Write
Compass

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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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I understand. You work very hard two days a week and you need a five-day weekend. That's normal.
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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 much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.
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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 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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The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.
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Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.
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I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.
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