Woody Allen Quotes

If I can play a scene in a master shot, I always prefer it. And the actors always prefer it. It's fun to look at on the screen, the actors get a chance to sink their teeth into something substantial, and it's economically helpful.

Sygmnd was a poor Austrian who'd lost all the vowels in his name in a boating accident.

Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer.

The most important words in the English language are not 'I love you' but 'it's benign.'

Showing up is 80 percent of life.

[An audience conditioned by a lifetime of television-watching is so corrupted that] their standards have been systematically lowered over the years. These guys sit in front of their sets and the gamma rays eat the white cells of their brains out!

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives.

Marriage is the death of hope.

I'm short enough and ugly enough to succeed on my own.

I didn't believe in reincarnation in my past life, and I still don't.

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

Death is an acquired trait.

Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality.

I feel humor is important for those two reasons: that it is a little bit of refreshment like music, and that women have told me over the years that it is very, very important to them.

I can't express anger. I grow a tumor instead.

I don't believe in competition for artistic things. I just like the atmosphere of the Cannes festival. I don't want to win anything or lose anything.

People always tease me. They say, look at you, you went for so much psychoanalysis and you're so neurotic, you wind up marrying a girl so much younger than you.

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.

The only love that lasts is unrequited love.

People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom.

What people who don't write don't understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don't. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it's the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don't think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I've said. And I laugh at it, because I'm hearing it for the first time myself.

The only thing standing between me and greatness is me.

I don't think my film style has changed. I'm doing the same kind of jokes I did when I was younger.

See, I never gain an ounce, because, you know, my anxiety acts like aerobics.

Anything worth knowing cannot be understood by the human mind.

As an artist, you are always striving toward an ultimate achievement but never seem to reach it. You shoot a film, and the result could have always been better. You try again, and fail once more. In some ways I find it enjoyable. You never lose sight of your goal. I don’t do my job to make money or to break box office records, I simply try things out. What would happen if I were to achieve perfection at some point? What would I do then?

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

Life is for the living.

The prison psychiatrist asked me if I thought sex was dirty. I told him only when it's done right.

What has gotten into you lately? Save a little craziness for menopause!

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.

Child molestation is a touchy subject... Read the papers! Half the country's doing it!

Your self-esteem is a notch below Kafka.

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

The government is unresponsive to the needs of the little man. Under 5' 7", it is impossible to get your congressman on the phone.

My parents were very Old World. They come from Brooklyn, which is the heart of the Old World. Their values in life are God and carpeting.

I'm trying to arrange my life so I don't have to be present.

I don't respond well to mellow, you know what I mean, I have a tendency to... if I get too mellow, I ripen and then rot.

People say that death is a part of life and there must be something to it, but I just see it as bad news and I want everybody to stop sugarcoating it.

Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. [...] But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences—they were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack.

I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.

The audience goes to sleep really quickly! If you have a slight pause at the wrong time, that's it!

Enthusiasm is a good engine, but it needs intelligence for a driver.

The Jewish culture - people that are Jewish have a certain cultural habit that they've formed and one of those habits is an appreciation of theater and music - these are cultural things one does associate with values that are promulgated by Jewish families. I think that's a good thing.

I took a puff of the wrong cigarette at a fraternity dance once, and the cops had to get me, y'know. I broke two teeth trying to give a hickie to the Statue of Liberty.

Have you ever noticed that good people sleep better, but bad people seem to have more fun when they're awake?