Neil Simon Writing Quotations

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

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.

I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.

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.

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.

I never write a play with an eye to film.

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.

[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.

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.

I feel like writing about a time when I was probably, and think all of us are, the happiest before the obligations start in.

I don’t like writing for comedians. I like writing for actors. The best comedians are the best actors.

The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.

Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of meditation- an investigation of my own life.