Woody Allen
American film director, writer, musician, actor and comedian.
I can't listen to that much Wagner, ya know ? I start to get the urge to conquer Poland.
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.
Agathon: But all that talk about death being the same as sleep.
Socrates: Yes, the difference is that when you're dead and somebody yells, "Everybody up, it's morning," it's very hard to find your slippers.
Harry: Between the Pope and air conditioning, I'd choose air conditioning.
Harry: Tradition is the illusion of permanence.
[The universe is] haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.
Harry: You think the President of the United States wants to fuck every woman he meets?... Well, bad example.
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.
I'm not really the heroic type. I was beat up by Quakers.
Harry: (On being called a self-hating Jew) Hey, I may hate myself, but not because I'm Jewish.
I bought her this handkerchief... and I didn't even know her size.
I don't believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
Death is a state of non-being. That which is not, does not exist. Therefore death does not exist. Only truth exists. Truth and beauty. Each is interchangeable, but are aspects of themselves. Er, what specifically did they say they had in mind for me?
And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly, would certain restaurants still require a jacket?
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!
I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.
Allen: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?
Woman: Yes, it is.
Allen: What does it say to you?
Woman: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless, bleak straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.
Allen: What are you doing Saturday night?
Woman: Committing suicide.
Allen: What about Friday night?
It figures you’ve got to hate yourself if you’ve got any integrity at all.
The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
This is my perspective and has always been my perspective on life: I have a very grim, pessimistic view of it. I always have, since I was a little boy. It hasn’t gotten worse with age or anything. I do feel that it’s a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself.