Woody Allen

It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.

Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.

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.

God is silent. Now if only man would shut up.

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.

I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member.

There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

Me sitting down for dinner with Ingmar Bergman felt like a house painter sitting down with Picasso.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

Show business is dog eat dog. It's worse than dog eat dog. It's dog doesn't return dog's phone calls.

Some of the best memories of my childhood that I have are the times that I played hooky from school so I could spend my days in the public library reading all the wonderful books at my disposal.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives.

Marriage is like mushrooms: we notice too late if they are good or bad.

If 90% of success in life is showing up, the other 10% depends on what you're showing up for.

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

Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.

I learned a few things on my own since, and modified some of the things he taught me, but everything, unequivocally, that I learned about comedy writing I learned from Danny Simon.

I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.

Yes, but the difference is that when you're dead and somebody yells, 'Everybody up, it's morning,' it's very hard to find your slippers.

What people who don't write don't understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don't. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it's the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don't think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I've said. And I laugh at it, because I'm hearing it for the first time myself.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut.