Woody Allen Quotes

196 Sourced Quotes

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.

Woody Allen
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Woody Allen
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?

Woody Allen
What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?

Woody Allen
Harry: (On being called a self-hating Jew) Hey, I may hate myself, but not because I'm Jewish.

Woody Allen
Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in the bath and she'd come in and sink my boats.

Woody Allen
It was partially my fault that we got divorced…I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

Woody Allen
Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again… I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O'Neill were laughing.

Woody Allen
You can't control life. It doesn't wind up perfectly. Only... only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

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

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

Woody Allen
There's a speech I had to cut out of [the 1979 film] Manhattan and plan to get into the next film, where my character says that the metaphor for life is a concentration camp. I do believe that.

Woody Allen
I can't get with any religion that advertises in Popular Mechanics.

Woody Allen
Of all the famous men who ever lived, the one I would most like to have been was Socrates. Not just because he was a great thinker, because I have been known to have some reasonably profound insights myself, although mine invariably revolve around a Swedish airline stewardess and some handcuffs.

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

Woody Allen
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.

Woody Allen
Cookie: What are you sad about?
Harry: I'm spiritually bankrupt. I'm empty.
Cookie: What do you mean?
Harry: I'm frightened. I got no soul, you know what I mean? Let me put it this way: when I was younger it was less scary waiting for Lefty than it is waiting for Godot.
Cookie: You lost me!
Harry: You know that the universe is coming apart? You know about that? You know what a black hole is?
Cookie: Yeah. That's how I make my living.

Woody Allen
Sex is like having dinner: sometimes you joke about the dishes, sometimes you take the meal seriously.

Woody Allen
Someone once asked me if my dream was to live on in the hearts of people, and I said I would prefer to live on in my apartment.

Woody Allen
Eternal nothingness is O. K. if you're dressed for it.

Woody Allen
In addition to our summer and winter estate, he owned a valuable piece of land. True, it was a small piece, but he carried it with him wherever he went.

Woody Allen
Sex between a man and a woman can be wonderful – provided you get between the right man and the right woman.

Woody Allen
As a filmmaker, I'm not interested in 9/11 [...] it's too small, history overwhelms it. The history of the world is like: He kills me, I kill him, only with different cosmetics and different castings. So in 2001, some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other. Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again.

Woody Allen
There is no question that one day gravity will suddenly cease and I will come loose and float up but I see myself floating up out of my trousers so not only am I adrift but hovering in my shorts.

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

Woody Allen
When it comes to sex there are certain things that should always be left unknown, and with my luck, they probably will be.

Woody Allen
It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off.

Woody Allen
Love is the answer. But while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.

Woody Allen
Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.

Woody Allen
I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
As Alvy Singer

Woody Allen