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

The line uses Neil Simon’s characteristic wry, conversational humor to make a blunt existential point: pain is not an aberration but a basic marker of being alive. It suggests that a life entirely free of hurt—emotional, physical, or psychological—would be so unlike ordinary human experience that it would amount to not having truly entered life at all. The quip also works as a corrective to fantasies of effortless happiness, implying that vulnerability and disappointment are inseparable from love, ambition, and connection. In that sense, the quote reframes suffering as evidence of participation in the world rather than as proof of failure.