Neil Simon Quotes

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

Sometimes it can be really exciting, but I avoid the blank page now. What I do is hand write everything. When you're hand writing, there's never a blank page, really. There's so much you can do with that.

Just start writing and you'll find what you want to say.

When you're sitting down and you're blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you're channeling something else.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

Fool," said my muse to me. "Look in thy heart and write.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.'

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.