"I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens." "I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer." "Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television." "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!" "To you, I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the loyal opposition." "The difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes it." "My one regret in life is that I am not someone else." "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work ... I want to achieve immortality through not dying." "It's a match made in heaven...by a retarded angel." "Is sex dirty? Only when it's being done right." "I just can't listen to any more Wagner, you know...I'm starting to get the urge to conquer Poland." "Men learn to love the woman they are attracted to. Women learn to become attracted to the man they fall in love with." "Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions." "I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable." "If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever." "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 happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness." "If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up." "You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred." "Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem." "I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government." "Eighty percent of success is showing up." "I'm not anti-social. I'm just not social." "There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more." "My brain? That's my second favorite organ." "I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict at the time. She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic." "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon." "If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans." "I can levitate birds. No one cares." "Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good." "I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member." "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." "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." "Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic." "I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox." "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." "The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you." "I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100." "If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss Bank." "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?" "I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own." "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet." "I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me." "I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose." "We're all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, Human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more." "A deranged person is supposed to have the strength of ten men. I have the strength of one small boy... with polio." "Some guy hit my fender the other day, and I said unto him, 'Be fruitful, and multiply'. But not in those words." "You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past." "I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead." "Those who can't do teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym." "In California, they don't throw their garbage away - they make it into TV shows." "How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?" "Sex between a man and a woman can be wonderful, provided you can get between the right man and the right woman." "I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse." "I hate reality but it's still the best place to get a good steak." "I should go to Paris and jump off of the Eiffel Tower. If I took the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier." "If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative." "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." "Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone you love." "You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ." "Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?" "I am at two with nature." "Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday." "It's better to be rich than poor, if only for financial reasons." "I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers." "Honey, you're the one who stopped sleeping with me, OK? It'll be a year come April 20th. I remember the date exactly, because it was Hitler's birthday." "Curiosity, that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It's our own hearts and minds." "Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies." "I can't fight. I was once run over by a car with a flat tire, being pushed by two guys." "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." "I'm short enough and ugly enough to succeed on my own." "Honey! Bring down a copy of my will - and an eraser!" "I was the captain of the latent paranoid softball team. We used to play all the neurotics on sunday morning. Nailbiters against the bedwetters, and if you've never seen neurotics play softball, it's really funny. I used to steal second base, and feel guilty and go back." "Tradition is the illusion of permanence." "I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception. I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said: 'No." "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." "I took a puff of the wrong cigarette at a fraternity dance once, and the cops had to get me, y'know. I broke two teeth trying to give a hickie to the Statue of Liberty." "There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?" "The wicked at heart probably know something." "Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: Frequently there must be a beverage." "The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep." "It's very hard to keep your spirits up. You've got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you.... you've got to find an answer to the question: Why go on?" "Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it." "I came home one night, some month ago, and I went to the closet in my bedroom...and a moth ate my sports jacket. He was laying on the floor, nauseous, y'know." "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?" "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." "How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?" "Standing in a garage no more makes you a car than standing in a church makes you a Christian." "He's a genius, she's a genius, wow, you know alot of geniuses, you should meet some stupid people sometime, you might learn something." "And my parents finally realize I'm kidnapped and they snap into action immediately: They rent out my room." "What the hell does it all mean anyhow? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nothing comes to anything. And yet, there's no shortage of idiots to babble. Not me. I have a vision. I'm discussing you. Your friends. Your coworkers. Your newspapers. The TV. Everybody's happy to talk. Full of misinformation. Morality, science, religion, politics, sports, love, your portfolio, your children, health. Christ, if I have to eat nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day to live, I don't wanna live. I hate goddamn fruits and vegetables. And your omega 3's, and the treadmill, and the cardiogram, and the mammogram, and the pelvic sonogram, and oh my god the-the-the colonoscopy, and with it all the day still comes where they put you in a box, and its on to the next generation of idiots, who'll also tell you all about life and define for you what's appropriate. My father committed suicide because the morning newspapers depressed him. And could you blame him? With the horror, and corruption, and ignorance, and poverty, and genocide, and AIDS, and global warming, and terrorism, and-and the family value morons, and the gun morons. 'The horror,' Kurtz said at the end of Heart of Darkness, 'the horror.' Lucky Kurtz didn't have the Times delivered in the jungle. Ugh... then he'd see some horror. But what do you do? You read about some massacre in Darfur or some school bus gets blown up, and you go 'Oh my God, the horror,' and then you turn the page and finish your eggs from the free range chickens. Because what can you do. It's overwhelming!" "His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." "I asked the girl if she could bring a sister for me. She did. Sister Maria Teresa. It was a very slow evening. We discussed the New Testament. We agreed that He was very well adjusted for an only child." "I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown." "I wonder if Socrates and Plato took a house on Crete during the summer." "My luck is getting worse and worse. Last night, for instance, I was mugged by a Quaker." "Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought - particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things." "I was walking through the woods, thinking about Christ. If He was a carpenter, I wondered what He charged for bookshelves." "You can't ride two horses with one behind." "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." "Kugelmass, unaware of this catastrophe, had his own problems. He had not been thrust into Portnoy's Complaint, or into any other novel, for that matter. He had been projected into an old textbook, Remedial Spanish, and was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener ('to have') - a large and hairy irregular verb - raced after him on its spindly legs." "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.'" "Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in my bath and she'd come in and sink my boats." "Someone once asked me if my dream was to live on in the hearts of my people, and I said I would like to live on in my apartment." "I love nature, I just don't want to get any of it on me." "I'm giving [my analyst] one more year - then I'm going to Lourdes." "This year I'm a star, but what will I be next year? A black hole?" "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." "While we're waiting for a cab I'll give you your lesson for today. Don't listen to what your teachers tell ya, you know. Don't pay attention. Just, just see what they look like and that's how you'll know what life is really gonna be like." "My films are therapy for my debilitating depression. In institutions people weave baskets. I make films." "So then, what do you believe in?<br /><br /> Sex and death. Two things that come once in my lifetime. But at least after death you're not nauseous." "Never shoot up in the air when you're standing under it." "I can't do anything to death, doctor's orders." "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) "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." "Millions of books written on every conceivable subject by all these great minds and in the end, none of them knows anything more about the big questions of life than I do ... I read Socrates. This guy knocked off little Greek boys. What the Hell's he got to teach me? And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we're gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. It's not worth it. And Freud, another great pessimist. I was in analysis for years and nothing happened. My poor analyst got so frustrated, the guy finally put in a salad bar. Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer." "All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it." "You know what my philosophy of life is? That it's important to have some laughs, but you got to suffer a little too, because otherwise you miss the whole point to life." "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." "Raised by two mothers...wow, most of us barely survive one." "Raining. Oh, brother, a scratch on the fender. Damn rabbi on his unicycle. Wait a minute, where are my car keys? Could have sworn I left them in this pocket. No, just some loose change and ticket stubs from the all-black version of Elaine Stritch' s one-woman show. Did I check my desk? Better go back inside. What's in the top drawer here? Hmm. Envelopes, my paper clips, a loaded revolver in case the tenant in 2A begins yodelling again." "'God, you Jews are truly exotic.'<br /> 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." "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." "Mrs. Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth! That's right! I can't work to order like a common tradesman! I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing, with wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won't fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid. I want to smash her! I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful." (If The Impressionists Had Been Dentists) "The only thing standing between me and greatness is me." "Life is short. Short, and not about anything except what you can touch and what touches you." "Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat...college..." "I have no idea what I am doing but incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm." "Don't think of death as an ending. Think of it as a really effective way of cutting down your expenses." "It was one of those great spring days, it was Sunday, and you knew summer would be coming soon. And I remember that morning Dorrie and I had gone for a walk in the park and come back to the apartment. We were just sort of sitting around and I put on a record of Louie Armstrong, which was music I grew up with, and it was very, very pretty, and I happened to glance over and I saw Dorrie sitting there. And I remember thinking to myself how terrific she was and how much I loved her. And I don't know, I guess it was a combination of everything, the sound of the music, and the breeze, and how beautiful Dorrie looked to me and for one brief moment everything just seemed to come together perfectly and I felt happy, almost indestructible in a way." "Why not? Life is short, life is dull, life is full of pain - and this is a chance for something special." "You'll find as you go through life that great depth and smoldering sensuality don't always win." "In my house I'm the boss, my wife is just the decision maker." "I've come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day." "Yo no quiero alcanzar la inmortalidad por mi obra. Quiero conseguirla por no morir. No quiero vivir en la memoria de mis compatriotas. Preferirķa vivir en mi apartamento." "We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth." "Having sex is like bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand." "It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to." "There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dark about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope." "You always think another time would have been ideal for you . . . the reality is there was no novocaine when you went to the dentist." "I broke up with this girl, and they put me with a psychiatrist who said, 'Why did you get so depressed, and do all those things you did?' I said, 'I wanted this girl and she left me.'<br /> <br /> And he said, 'Well, we have to look into that.'<br /> <br /> And I said, 'There's nothing to look into! I wanted her and she left me.' And he said, 'Well, why are you feeling so intense?'<br /> <br /> And I said, 'Cause I want the girl!' And he said, 'What's underneath it?' And I said, 'Nothing!'<br /> <br /> He said, 'I'll have to give you medication.'<br /> <br /> I said, 'I don't want medication! I want the girl!'<br /> <br /> And he said, 'We have to work this through.'<br /> <br /> So, I took a fire extinguisher from the casement and struck him across the back of his neck. And before I knew it, guys from Con Ed had jumper cables in my head and the rest was....." "The curtain rises on a vast primitive wasteland, not unlike certain parts of New Jersey." "Am I my brother's keeper? Yes. Interestingly, in my case, I share that honor with the Prospect Park Zoo." Woody Allen