Woody Allen Quotes

You know, the whole American culture is going down the drain, you can't turn on a television set and see anything, or walk in the street and not find garbage, or neighborhoods that were formerly beautiful now have McDonald's in them, and it's all a part of an enormous degeneration of culture in the United States. People that exist in that culture are forced to make moral decisions all the time about their lives, their occupations, their love-lives, and they make decisions that are commensurate with what's happening to them in this culture, and it's too bad that that's happening because that's what Manhattan is about, that New York used to be such a great city, so wonderful, and it has to fight every day for its survival against the encroachment of all this terrible ugliness that is gradually overcoming all the big cities in America.
This ugliness comes from a culture that has no spiritual center, a culture that has money and education, but no sense of being at peace with the world, no sense of purpose in life. They don't know what they're doing, or why they're here. They have no religious center, they have no philosophical center, and so they act, they do what's expedient at the moment. They have no long view of society. They only have the view of quick money, and kill the pain of the moment, and so instead of dealing with the real problems that exist, that are complicated, they sweep them under the rug by turning on the television set, or taking cocaine, or doing many things that enable them to escape confrontation with the unpleasant realities of the world.

I WANTED nothing more than to be a foreign filmmaker, but of course I was from Brooklyn, which was not a foreign country. Through a happy accident I wound up being a foreign filmmaker because I couldn't raise money any other way.

Woody Allen later wrote in a letter: "My observation was that once a person actually completed a play or a novel, he was well on his way to getting it produced or published, as opposed to a vast majority of people who tell me their ambition is to write, but who strike out on the very first level and indeed never write the play or book. In the midst of the conversation, as I'm now trying to recall, I did say that 80 percent of success is showing up." - 1989 August 13, New York Times, On Language: The Elysian Fields by William Safire.

I have learned one thing. As Woody says, "Showing up is 80 percent of life." Sometimes it's easier to hide home in bed. I've done both. - 1977 August 21, New York Times, Section 2: Arts and Leisure, He's Woody Allen's Not-So-Silent Partner by Susan Braudy, Page 11 (ProQuest Page 83), New York.

To a man standing on the shore, time passes quicker than to a man on a boat — especially if the man on the boat is with his wife.

Bidnick gorges himself on Viagra, but the dosage makes him hallucinate and causes him to imagine he is Pliny the Elder.

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.

As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness.

She quarreled with the nanny and accused her of brushing Misha's teeth sideways rather than up and down.

I have also reviewed my own financial obligations, which have puffed up recently like a hammered thumb.

With that, he scribbled in an additional ninety thousand dollars on the estimate, which had waxed to the girth of the Talmud while rivaling it in possible interpretations.

And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly, would certain restaurants still require a jacket?

How could I not have known that there are little things the size of "Planck length" in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theater how hard it would be to find.

It is a gorgeous gold pocket watch, however, I'm proud of it. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.

When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.