Neil Simon Quotes

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them.

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

I've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays.

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

When you write a script, you always think about what your heart is asking.

I want to be inside Nic Pizzolatto's brain.

I get so excited about reading a new script.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

The script, I always believe, is the foundation of everything. And if you don't connect to that foundation, if you don't believe in that and feel that you wanna spend three, four months of your life exploring it, then all of the other elements are secondary.

I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened.

I work in a dramatic context, meaning we write with a lot of character specifics, a lot of story specifics. There's a lot of architecture in our songs.

In school, I used to write scripts and all that good stuff.

I'm kind of down for anything, as long as it's an amazing script that speaks to me, so I'm just constantly reading and constantly looking.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.