Neil Simon Quotes

Once you start compromising your thoughts, you're a candidate for mediocrity.

If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.

If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet.

I firmly believe that if you follow a path that interests you, not to the exclusion of love, sensitivity, and cooperation with others, but with the strength of conviction that you can move others by your own efforts, and do not make success or failure the criteria by which you live, the chances are you'll be a person worthy of your own respects.

Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity.

I love living. I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far.

When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.

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.

Talent is the gift plus the passion - a desire to succeed so intense that no force on earth can stop it.

Once you've opened yourself up, it's best to go all the way.

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.

All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.

The body of a young woman is God's greatest achievement...Of course, He could have built it to last longer but you can't have everything.

Give your mind a chance to travel through foreign languages.

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.

Money brings some happiness. But after a certain point, it just brings more money.

Take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage. Like two out of every ten couples.

There's no such thing as a sure thing. That's why they call it gambling.

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.

I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.

It looks different when you're sober; I thought I had twice as much furniture.

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

I understand. You work very hard two days a week and you need a five-day weekend. That's normal.

[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.