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Woody Allen

130 quotes

“Harry: (On being called a self-hating Jew) Hey, I may hate myself, but not because I'm Jewish.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Doris: You have no values. With you it's all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.Harry: Hey, in France I could run for office with that slogan, and win!”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Devil: You want me to turn the air-conditioning on?Harry: You have air-conditioning in Hell?The Devil: Sure, it fucks up the ozone layer!”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Harry: All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lot of things have happened in my private life recently that I thought we could review tonight.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five, it's fantastic.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A fast word about oral contraception. I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said "no.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in the bath and she'd come in and sink my boats.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was in analysis. I was suicidal. As a matter of fact, I would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not a drinker — my body will not tolerate spirits. I had two Martinis on New Year's Eve and I tried to hijack an elevator and fly it to Cuba.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a gorgeous gold pocket watch, however, I'm proud of it. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How could I not have known that there are little things the size of "Planck length" in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theater how hard it would be to find.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly, would certain restaurants still require a jacket?”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With that, he scribbled in an additional ninety thousand dollars on the estimate, which had waxed to the girth of the Talmud while rivaling it in possible interpretations.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have also reviewed my own financial obligations, which have puffed up recently like a hammered thumb.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She quarreled with the nanny and accused her of brushing Misha's teeth sideways rather than up and down.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was supremely confident my flair for atmosphere and characterization would sparkle alongside the numbing mulch ground out by studio hacks. Certainly the space atop my mantel might be better festooned by a gold statuette than by the plastic dipping bird that now bobbed there ad infinitum.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bidnick gorges himself on Viagra, but the dosage makes him hallucinate and causes him to imagine he is Pliny the Elder.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To a man standing on the shore, time passes quicker than to a man on a boat — especially if the man on the boat is with his wife.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I WANTED nothing more than to be a foreign filmmaker, but of course I was from Brooklyn, which was not a foreign country. Through a happy accident I wound up being a foreign filmmaker because I couldn't raise money any other way.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in the New York Times, That's Amore: Italy as Muse: Woody Allen on Italian Movies and 'To Rome With Love', June 15, 2012.
“I have no apprehension whatsoever. I've been through this so many times. And I found that one way or the other, your life doesn't change at all. Which is sad, in a way. Because the people love your film... nothing great happens. And people hate your film... nothing terrible happens. Many years ago, I would... I would... a film of mine would open, and it would get great reviews, and I would go down and look at the movie theater. There'd be a line around the block. And when a film is reviled, you open a film and people say "Oh, it's the stupidest thing, it's the worst movie." You think: oh, nobody's going to ever speak to you again. But, it doesn't happen. Nobody cares. You know, they read it and they say "Oh, they hated your film." You care, at the time. But they don't. Nobody else cares. They're not interested. They've got their own lives, and their own problems, and their own shadows on their lungs, and their x-rays. And, you know, they've got their own stuff they're dealing with.... So, I'm just never nervous about it.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: September 2007 interview, promoting Cassandra's Dreams.
“I made the statement years ago which is often quoted that 80 percent of life is showing up. People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn't do it, that's why they don't accomplish a thing, they don't do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say [sic] my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview for The Collider (2008), see copy in Wayback Machine
“You start to think, when you're younger, how important everything is and how things have to go right—your job, your career, your life, your choices, and all of that. Then, after a while, you start to realise that – I'm talking the big picture here – eventually you die, and eventually the sun burns out and the earth is gone, and eventually all the stars and all the planets in the entire universe go, disappear, and nothing is left at all. Nothing – Shakespeare and Beethoven and Michelangelo gone. And you think to yourself that there's a lot of noise and sound and fury – and where's it going? It's not going any place... Now, you can't actually live your life like that, because if you do you just sit there and – why do anything? Why get up in the morning and do anything? So I think it's the job of the artist to try and figure out why, given this terrible fact, you want to go on living.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with France 24 (2010).
“If I don't kill him he'll make war all through Europe. But murder... the most foul of all crimes. What would Socrates say? All those Greeks were homosexuals. Boy, they must have had some wild parties. I bet they all took a house together in Crete for the summer. A: Socrates is a man. B: All men are mortal. C: All men are Socrates. That means all men are homosexuals. Heh... I'm not a homosexual. Once, some cossacks whistled at me. I happen to have the kind of body that excites both persuasions. You know, some men are heterosexual and some men are bisexual and some men don't think about sex at all, you know... they become lawyers.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A typical "explained" incident is the one reported by Sir Chester Ramsbottom, on June 5, 1961, in Shropshire: "I was driving along the road at 2 A.M. and saw a cigar-shaped object that seemed to be tracking my car. No matter which way I drove, it stayed with me, turning sharply at right angles. It was a fierce, glowing red, and in spite of twisting and turning the car at high speed I could not lose it. I became alarmed and began sweating. I let out a shriek of terror and apparently fainted, but awoke in a hospital, miraculously unharmed." Upon investigation, experts determined that the "cigar-shaped object" was Sir Chester's nose. Naturally, all his evasive actions could not lose it, since it was attached to his face.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, the whole American culture is going down the drain, you can't turn on a television set and see anything, or walk in the street and not find garbage, or neighborhoods that were formerly beautiful now have McDonald's in them, and it's all a part of an enormous degeneration of culture in the United States. People that exist in that culture are forced to make moral decisions all the time about their lives, their occupations, their love-lives, and they make decisions that are commensurate with what's happening to them in this culture, and it's too bad that that's happening because that's what Manhattan is about, that New York used to be such a great city, so wonderful, and it has to fight every day for its survival against the encroachment of all this terrible ugliness that is gradually overcoming all the big cities in America. This ugliness comes from a culture that has no spiritual center, a culture that has money and education, but no sense of being at peace with the world, no sense of purpose in life. They don't know what they're doing, or why they're here. They have no religious center, they have no philosophical center, and so they act, they do what's expedient at the moment. They have no long view of society. They only have the view of quick money, and kill the pain of the moment, and so instead of dealing with the real problems that exist, that are complicated, they sweep them under the rug by turning on the television set, or taking cocaine, or doing many things that enable them to escape confrontation with the unpleasant realities of the world.”
Woody Allen (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source