Woody Allen Quotes

When you work from city to city or country to country, you work the same way; the working method is the same.

I write the script; nobody sees it, not the people that put the money in the picture. I cast who I want, and make the film. That's why I've always felt the only thing standing between me and greatness, is me. There's no excuse for me not to be great except that I'm not.

A ship is safe in the harbor, but that's not where ships belong.

Inertia accounts for two-thirds of marriages. But love accounts for the other third.

You can't anticipate in the room the riches of what you encounter when you're location hunting for a movie.

Dear Mom and Dad, Leave $50,000 in a bag under the bridge on Decatur Street. If there is no bridge on Decatur Street, please build one.

Sex is better than talk. Ask anybody in this bar. Talk is what you suffer through so you can get to sex.

This year I'm a star, but what will I be next year? A black hole?

I don't wanna live on in my work. I wanna live on in my apartment.

How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can-opener works.

I keep getting more and more ambitious. Over the years, to some degree, in some areas, I feel I've grown. In some areas, I made a fool of myself. In some areas, I think I can still do some funny things.

Just don't take any class where you have to read BEOWULF.

You're a genius! And the proof is that both common people and intellectuals find your work completely incoherent.

Mrs. Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth! That's right! I can't work to order like a common tradesman! I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing, with wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won't fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid. I want to smash her! I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful.

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Paris is particularly beautiful in the rain. It was just a nice experience for me, a pleasant experience, and I was able to present it to the world through my eyes, very subjectively - not realistically, but subjectively.

All the crap they tell you about ... getting joy and having a kind of wisdom in your golden years - it's all tripe.

I was walking through the woods, thinking about Christ. If He was a carpenter, I wondered what He charged for bookshelves.

You can be with your wife, very happily married, and then you meet some woman and you love her. But you love your wife, too. And you also love that one. Or if she's met some man and she loves the man and she loves you. And then you meet somebody else and now there are three of you. Why only one person?

I never knew what Amazon was. I've never seen any of those series, even on cable. I've never seen The Sopranos, or Mad Men. I'm out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there's Charlie Rose and I go to sleep.

You're still in love' 'No I'm not, I'm not She'll always be a part of me, and she's an important person in my life but for the two of us something wasn't working.' 'What element?' 'We never found out

Photons have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic.

The only thing standing between me and greatness is me.

Some people are funny, and some people are not funny. Many people who are not funny can make a living at it. You don't have to be great to make a living at it. Just like a doctor who doesn't have to be great can still make a living out of it.

[Analysis] has helped, but not as much as I've wanted. Years ago, I remember, I brought my clarinet into the repair shop, and the guy took two weeks and put new pads on and everything. When I went in, I said, 'Thank you, but am I going to sound better?' And he said, 'Yes, you will sound better, but not as much as you'd like to.

Your still searching for me in every woman. You'll always seek to duplicate what we had. You know it.

Over the years I've never written or made movies about political themes 'cause while they do have current critical importance, in the large, large scheme of things, only the big questions matter and the answers to those big questions are very, very depressing.

Geez, I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I'm never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts.

To me there's no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They're all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.

Mankind is facing a crossroad - one road leads to despair and utter hopelessness and the other to total extinction - I sincerely hope you graduates choose the right road

Fantasy is seductive and much more wonderful than reality, but you can't take it to the bank. It's always an escape. And if used as an escape, as in attending a movie or a show for a circumscribed period of time, it's fine. When it starts to become undifferentiated from reality, it leads to big trouble.

There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better ... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

I'm twelve years old. I run into a synagogue. I ask the rabbi the meaning of life. He tells me the meaning of life but he tells it to me in Hebrew. I don't understand Hebrew. Then he wants to charge me $600 for Hebrew lessons.

What do I dislike about death? Must be the hours.

In formulating any philosophy the first consideration must always be: What can we know? That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is at all knowable. Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything? Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote, 'My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.

Life is hard for insects. And don't think mice are having any fun either.

You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ.

My brain? That's my second favorite organ.

No work of art can compare to a city.

Money is not everything, but it is better than having one's health.

I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.

I've become the person I've always hated, but I'm happier.

Is world peace possible or is the human race too innately aggressive? For instance: Have you ever seen women at a sample sale?

Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.

Life is unresolved, confusing, bewildering, puzzling, ambiguous. You don't really know what's going to happen. The future is uncertain for everybody.

Arlene and I have to get a divorce. She thinks I'm a pervert because I drank our water bed.

Everybody knows how awful the world is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things, others with sports, money, love, art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.

The most expensive sex is free sex

He's a genius, she's a genius, wow, you know alot of geniuses, you should meet some stupid people sometime, you might learn something

Even if God exists, he's done such a terrible job, it's a wonder people don't get together and file a class action suit against him.

How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not "the thing with feathers." The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.

If you pursue the other woman, it's a losing situation and it's not good for your relationship or your marriage. If your marriage is open and you're allowed to, that's no good either. There's no way, really in the end, to be happy unless you get very lucky.

I have a great admiration for English actors and actresses and have used them at every opportunity over the years, but now I won't have to import them to New York

In the shower, with the hot water coming down, you've left the real world behind, and very frequently things open up for you. It's the change of venue, the unblocking the attempt to force the ideas that's crippling you when you're trying to write.

I never thought I was doing anyone a favour by bringing children into the world. With people as cruel to each other as they are, it's a terrible proposition. The best of lives are sad and tragic. The best of them. My general conclusion is that it's not a nice thing to do. The world doesn't need it. The kid doesn't need it.

My grammy never gave gifts, you know. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks.

The wicked at heart probably know something.

I've never had a block. I'm talking within the limits of my abilities. But in my own small way, I've had an embarrassment of riches. I'll have five ideas and I'm dying to do them all. It takes weeks or months where I agonize and obsess over which to do next. I wish sometimes someone would choose for me. If someone said, Do idea number three next, that would be fine. But I have never had any sense of running dry.

In certain areas I don't function well and in other areas I function very well. I'm very good professionally. I have good discipline, I'm able to write every day and do films and not go six times over the budget. I mean I'm a coherent person, but I also don't like to go through tunnels when I travel. I'm claustrophobic.

Change is almost always negative. Things degenerate.

I don't want to be immortal through my works. I want to be immortal by not dying.

And in all of Babylonia there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, 'til the prophets bade the multitudes get a grip on themselves and shape up.

I work all the time because it's a great distraction and it keeps me from sitting home and obsessing morbidly.

What is fascinating is that it is physical. You know, that's one thing about intellectuals, they've proved that you can be absolute brilliant and have no idea what's going on. But on the other hand, the body doesn't lie, as we now know. Nono, it'll be great, because all of those ph.Ds are in there, like, discussing modes of alienation, and we'll be in here quietly humping.

I loathed every day and regret every moment I spent in a school.

I think it's my job or the artist's job, to try and find some solution or some reason to accept things. But given the grimmest reality, I feel the grimmest facts are the real facts, the true facts: that you're born, you die, you suffer, it's to no purpose, and you're gone forever, ever, ever, and that's it.

I don't inhale because it gives you cancer, but I look so incredibly handsome with a cigarette that I can't not hold one.

I never think I feel cynical in general. Cynical is reality with an alternate spelling. I feel there's a gigantic amount of injustice and overt crime every day in the world, from emotional crimes to international crimes, and it often carries rewards.

I wonder if Socrates and Plato took a house on Crete during the summer.

When a man is driving in a car and looks out the window and notices a woman with a great body, as he strains to check her face out, how does she know to keep turning so the back of her head is always toward him?

Human existence is a brutal experience to me ... it's a brutal, meaningless experience - an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, terrible experience, and so it [salvation] is what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most.

Fantasy is only a state of mind that you can employ when existing in a real context.

Many people who get a lot of money are willing to work with me for no money. This is true.

I just can't listen to any more Wagner, you know ... I'm starting to get the urge to conquer Poland.

Sex and death - two things that come once in a lifetime.

When you make the film, there's a big difference between when you're in your own home at the typewriter, and when you're standing on a mountain, or on a street corner, and buses are coming by-it's a different reality. You make a million changes that were never in the script, but that reality dictates.

Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.

The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you.

I believe that sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five, it's fantastic.

I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally, without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the organized hustles.

People make films for different reasons. For money. Or, they make them because something in them demands artistic expression. I do it because I enjoy the work.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

When the Academy called, I panicked. I thought they might want their Oscars back and the pawn shop has been out of business for a while.

I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.

Is Knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?

I should have known something was wrong with my first wife. When I brought her home to meet my parents, they approved of her.

The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep.

Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately, no one we know belongs.

The whole thrust of science and the medical profession is to try and prevent it from happening, to try to prolong life, to keep you from dying, to keep you from getting older, to rejuvenate you. I mean, that's everybody's wish. The fountain of youth is everybody's sought-after thing.

It's just gossip, you know. Gossip is the new pornography.

For some reason I'm more appreciated in France than I am back home. The subtitles must be incredibly good.

Be alert. The world needs more lerts.

It figures you've got to hate yourself if you've got any integrity at all.

I never ever see a film of mine after I release it to the public. I see it when I shoot it in my dailies and while I'm editing it, re-editing it and reshooting it and all that. By the time it's finished I never want to see it again.

Problems are like toilet paper. You pull on one and ten more come.

I foresee death by culture shock.

In 1940 I was just turning 5 years old and being taken to the movies. For those of us who were not old enough to understand the horror of war it was a very romantic era because these guys were kissing their wives and girlfriends goodbye and going off to fight and become heroes.

If you meet somebody and are attracted to someone, and the exquisite neurons in your brain and her brain intermesh properly, then things can be wonderful. It's not like homework. You don't have to work at the relationship.