Woody Allen

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

“Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat...college,”

“I'm giving [my analyst] one more year--then I'm going to Lourdes.”

“In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!”

“The heart wants what it wants.”

“The wicked at heart probably know something.”

“This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken. The doctor says, Well, why don’t you turn him in? And the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. Well I guess that’s pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd but I guess we keep going through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.”

“I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.”

“Tradition is the illusion of permanence.”

“You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”

“I don't think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.”

“Curiosity, that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It's our own hearts and minds.”

“Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone you love.”

“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.”

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

“His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.”

“My luck is getting worse and worse. Last night, for instance, I was mugged by a Quaker.”

“Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?”

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”

“Na realidade, prefiro a ciência à religião. Se me fizerem escolher entre Deus e o ar condicionado, fico com o ar.”

“I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.”

“There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?”

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

“She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.”

“Ads answered out of desperation in the New York Review of Books proved equally futile as…the 'Bay Area Bisexual' told me I didn't quite coincide with either of her desires.”

“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.”

“God, you Jews are truly exotic."Exotic? She should only know the Greenblatts. Or Mr. and Mrs. Milton Sharpstein, my father's friends. Or for that matter, my cousin Tovah. Exotic? I mean, they're nice, but hardly exotic with their endless bickering over the best way to combat indigestion or how far back to sit from the television set.”

“The last woman I was in was the Statue of Liberty.”

“Some guy hit my fender the other day, and I said unto him, 'Be fruitful, and multiply'. But not in those words.”

“What if the worst is true? What if there's no God, and you only go around once, and that's it? Don't you want to be a part of the experience? You know, what the hell? It's not all a drag, and I'm thinking to myself: Geez! I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I'm never gonna get and just enjoy it while it lasts. And, you know, after--who knows? Maybe there is something, nobody really knows. I know that maybe is a very slim reed to hang your whole life on, but that's the best we have.”

“You're so good looking I can barely keep my eyes on the meter.”

“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.”

“I'm not anti-social. I'm just not social.”

“Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.”

“You can't ride two horses with one behind.”

“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.”

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

“Chapter 1.He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion...no, make that: he - he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yeah. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.'Uh, no let me start this over.'Chapter 1.He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles...'. Ah, corny, too corny for my taste. Can we ... can we try and make it more profound?'Chapter 1.He adored New York City. For him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in...'No, that's going to be too preachy. I mean, you know, let's face it, I want to sell some books here.'Chapter 1.He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage...'Too angry, I don't want to be angry.'Chapter 1.He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.'I love this.'New York was his town, and it always would be.”

“Your self esteem is like a notch below Kafka's.”

“Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.”

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

“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”

“I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

“Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.”

“There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?”

“What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream?”

“Men learn to love the woman they are attracted to. Women learn to become attracted to the man they fall in love with.”

“I can levitate birds. No one cares.”

“As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree' -- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.”

“Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: Frequently there must be a beverage.”