Quotes from Woody Allen

When we lose twenty pounds... we may be losing the twenty best pounds we have! We may be losing the pounds that contain our genius, our humanity, our love and honesty.

Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.

Sex is better than talk. Ask anybody in this bar. Talk is what you suffer through so you can get to sex.

I think [aging] has nothing to recommend it. You don't gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you'd trade all of that for being 35 again.

Marriage? That's for life! It's like cement!

To me there's no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They're all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

People always ask me, Do you ever think you'll wake up one morning and not be funny? That thought would never occur to me--it's an odd thought and not realistic. Because funny and me are not separate. We're one.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.

Can we actually "know" the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.

I've never felt Truth was Beauty. Never. I've always felt that people can't take too much reality. I like being in Ingmar Bergman's world. Or in Louis Armstrong's world. Or in the world of the New York Knicks. Because it's not this world. You spend your whole life searching for a way out. You just get an overdose of reality, you know, and it's a terrible thing. I'm always fighting against reality.

All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we chose to distort it.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

I'm not a drinker -- my body will not tolerate spirits. I had two Martinis on New Year's Eve and I tried to hijack an elevator and fly it to Cuba.

Sam and I go way back to when he was a young coroner starting out and used to perform autopsies at weddings an sweet sixteens for cigarette money.

Men would make love with any number of women ... even total strangers, while females were selective. They were catering to the demands of one small egg. While males had millions of frantic sperms screaming: "Let us out, let us out!"

Human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun.

I was supremely confident my flair for atmosphere and characterization would sparkle alongside the numbing mulch ground out by studio hacks. Certainly the space atop my mantel might be better festooned by a gold statuette than by the plastic dipping bird that now bobbed there ad infinitum.

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 unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness -- I hope you're getting this down.

When a film is reviled, you open a film and people say "Oh, it's the stupidest thing, it's the worst movie." You think: oh, nobody's going to ever speak to you again. But, it doesn't happen. Nobody cares. You know, they read it and they say "Oh, they hated your film." You care, at the time. But they don't. Nobody else cares.

Thought: Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.

Last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.

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

The key here, I think, is to not think of death as an end. But ... but ... think of it more as a very effective way of cutting down on your expenses.