Neil Simon Quotes - Page 2

I got brown sandwiches and green sandwiches. Its either very new cheese or very old meat. - Oscar Madison, from The Odd Couple

Don't listen to those who say, you taking too big a chance. Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today.

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.

How long do you want to wait until you start enjoying life? When you're sixty-five you get social security.

Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.

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.

I don't like losing the words, as you have to, when I'm asked to turn a play into a movie. It's not a matter of ego . . . I'm just better able to create the character for an audience through words rather than through actions.

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

You must realize that honorary degrees are given generally to people whose SAT scores were too low to get them into schools the regular way. As a matter of fact, it was my SAT scores that led me into my present vocation in life, comedy.

I don't use computers... I'm someone who needs to see the page right away in my hand.

Goldie Hawn is funny, sexy, beautiful, talented, intelligent, warm, and consistently sunny. Other than that, she doesn't impress me at all.

People with honorary awards are looked upon with disfavor. Would you let an honorary mechanic fix your brand-new Mercedes?

Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count.

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.

He's too nervous to kill himself. He wears his seat belt in a drive-in movie.

Sports is the only entertainment where, no matter how many times you go back, you never know the ending.

Baptists are only funny underwater.

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 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.

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.

There are two million interesting people in New York and only seventy-eight in Los Angeles.

Evan Handler's new book is simply wonderful. He pulls you inside his life, and you come out his very close friend.

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

Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.