Best 45 quotes of Neil Simon on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

Give your mind a chance to travel through foreign languages.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

A writer without confidence is like a metaphor without something to compare itself to.

Don't listen to those who say, you are taking too big a chance. Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today. Most important, don't listen when the little voice of fear inside you rears its ugly head ...

OSCAR. Don't you know what's happening to the old gang? It's breaking up. Everyone's getting divorced....I swear, we used to have better games when we couldn't get out at night.

OSCAR. (With a pointing finger.) I'm warning you. You want to live here, I don't want to see you, I don't want to hear you and I don't want to smell your cooking. Now get this spaghetti off my poker table. FELIX. Ha! Haha! OSCAR. What the hell's so funny? FELIX. It's not spaghetti. It's linguini! (OSCAR picks up the plate of linguini, crosses to the doorway, and hurls it into the kitchen.) OSCAR. Now it's garbage!

[Y]ou're young. Young takes care of everything.