Woody Allen Quotes

The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

By now they had mastered my own language, but they still made simple mistakes, like using 'hermeneutics,' when they meant 'heuristic'.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

There will be no major solution to the suffering of humanity until we reach some understanding of who we are, what the purpose of creation was, what happens after death. Until those questions are resolved we are caught.

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

I'm not a drinker, my body won't tolerate...eh...spirits, really. I had two martinis New Years Eve and I tried to hi-jack an elevator and fly it to Cuba.

Is old age really so terrible? Not if you've brushed your teeth faithfully.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.

Oh, he was probably a member of the National Rifle Association. It was a group that helped criminals get guns so they could shoot citizens. It was a public service.

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

To me nature is... spiders and bugs, and big fish eating little fish, and plants eating plans, and animals eating... It's like an enormous restaurant, that's the way I see it.

In New York State they have a strange law that says you can't get a divorce unless you can prove adultery - and it's weird, because the Ten Commandments say 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' But New York State says you have to. Well, finally, what happened was that my wife committed adultery for me. She's always been more mechanically inclined than I have.

You are always a comedian by default. You are this way because you've been forced to be this way, but it is better to be the hero. So if you can be a persona, the great one of my lifetime of course was and is Marlon Brando.

I’m going to kill myself. I should go to Paris and jump off the Eiffel Tower. I’ll be dead. you know, in fact, if I get the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier, which would be perfect. Or wait a minute. It -- with the time change, I could be alive for six hours in New York but dead three hours in Paris. I could get things done, and I could also be dead.

You'll find as you go through life that great depth and smoldering sensuality don't always win.

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.

God is either cruel or incompetent.

I'm not a big believer in the sense of Jews having a monopoly on comedy.

All i have in my life is my imagination

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.

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 afraid of the dark,and suspicious of the light.

My Lord, my Lord! What hath Thou done lately?

I don't get depressed; I grow a tumor instead.

I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead - not sick, not wounded - dead.

During the course of the year a number of ideas just come up automatically. I could be walking down the street. Or shaving. An idea will hit me and I'll write it down. Then, when I'm ready to write, I check my little matchbooks and napkins and find that it is good or it's pretty terrible. There are other times when I don't have any ideas and I'll go into a room and close the door and I sit and sweat it out for a day or a month and eventually I come up with [something].

There's no way to prove that there is no God. You just have to take it on faith.

Honey! Bring down a copy of my will - and an eraser!

I could turn on my radio in the morning when I was getting dressed for school and hear Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman and think this is the music. Now that music is art. Ellington is art. At that time it was just what you heard on the radio. Cole Porter was just a guy who wrote pretty songs and Billie Holliday would sing them.

I didn't know he was dead; I thought he was British.

Because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.

Should I marry W? Not if she won't tell me the other letters in her name. And what about her career? How can I ask a woman of her beauty to give up the Roller Derby? Decisions...

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

I failed to make the chess team because of my height.

There is something about big cities that turns me on, and for whatever mysterious reason, places like New York and Paris inspire me. I think it's because cities represent civilization, and as crime-ridden and broken down as some of them are, it's still better than skipping through a meadow.

Gauguin flew into a frenzy! He held my head under the X-ray machine for ten straight minutes and for several hours after I could not blink my eyes in unison." — "If The Impressionists Had Been Dentists

I hate the beach. I hate the sun. I'm pale and I'm redheaded. I don't tan - I stroke!

I always felt that the problems of the world would never ever be solved until people came to terms with the deeper issues [spiritual] - that there would be an aimless reshuffling of world leaders and governments and programs.

Life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do.

If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.

90 per cent of success is turning up.

Spencer was searching for a woman interested in gold, inorganic chemistry, outdoor sex and the music of Bach. In short, he was looking for himself, only female.

Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes.

I believe in sex and death- two experiences that come once in a lifetime.

When I'm not working, I think and I think when I get depressed.

If 90% of success in life is showing up, the other 10% depends on what you're showing up for.

I would not like to live in the past because you don't get anesthetic when you go to the dentist. You don't get antibiotics. You don't get the things that you are used to now, cell phones and televisions and things that are very convenient. You don't want that. But, it would be fun if you could, every now and then, just meet a friend for lunch at Maxim's in Paris in 1900, or go back to 1870 just for a couple of hours, take a walk in the park, and then come right back to Broadway.

I recently turned 60. Practically a third of my life is over.