Woody Allen is a renowned director, writer, and comedian. He’s the brilliant neurotic behind favorite films like Annie Hall and Manhattan. And he’s got a whole lot of hilarious and insightful things to say about just about everything.
Here we rounded up our absolute favorite Woody Allen quotes of all time.
“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans. - Woody Allen
“Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love. - Woody Allen
“Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer. - Woody Allen
“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! - Woody Allen
“Talent is luck. The important thing in life is courage. - Woody Allen
“Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat… college. - Woody Allen
“Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon. - Woody Allen
“The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence. - Woody Allen
“All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it. - Woody Allen
“My one regret in life is that I am not someone else. - Woody Allen
“The heart wants what it wants. There’s no logic to these things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that’s that. - Woody Allen
“My heart says one thing. My head says another. Very hard to get your heart and head together in life. - Woody Allen
“I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens. - Woody Allen
“To you, I’m an atheist. To God, I’m the loyal opposition - Woody Allen
“I’m such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own. - Woody Allen
“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. - Woody Allen
“I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox. - Woody Allen
“You can’t control life. It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only-only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert. - Woody Allen
“I can’t express anger. That’s one of the problems I have. I grow a tumor instead. - Woody Allen
“Eighty percent of success is showing up. - Woody Allen
“Life is short. Short, and not about anything except what you can touch and what touches you. - Woody Allen
“The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever. - Woody Allen
“The man who said “I’d rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose. - Woody Allen
“Curiosity, that’s what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It’s our own hearts and minds. - Woody Allen
“The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don’t have. - Woody Allen
“Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions. - Woody Allen
“You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred. - Woody Allen
“The heart is a very, very resilient little muscle. It really is. - Woody Allen
“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative. - Woody Allen
“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. - Woody Allen
“If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse. - Woody Allen
“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. - Woody Allen
“Anything worth knowing cannot be understood by the human mind. - Woody Allen
“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
“I have no idea what I am doing. But incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm. - Woody Allen
“Men learn to love the woman they are attracted to. Women learn to become attracted to the man they fall in love with. - Woody Allen
“You know, it’s one thing about intellectuals, they prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on. - Woody Allen
“Sex is better than talk. Ask anybody in this bar. Talk is what you suffer through so you can get to sex. - Woody Allen
“If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank. - Woody Allen
“The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty. - Woody Allen
“It’s a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. - Woody Allen
“I love nature, I just don’t want to get any of it on me. - Woody Allen
“I feel sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five, it’s fantastic. - Woody Allen
“Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night. - Woody Allen
“See, I never gain an ounce, because, you know, my anxiety acts like aerobics. - Woody Allen
“When it comes to sex there are certain things that should always be left unknown, and with my luck, they probably will be. - Woody Allen
“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. - Woody Allen
“I have a hyper-active imagination, my mind tends to jump around a little, and I have some trouble between fantasy and reality. - Woody Allen
“Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem. - Woody Allen
“You know a lot of geniuses, y’know. You should meet some stupid people once in a while, y’know, you could learn something. - Woody Allen
“I am plagued by doubts. - Woody Allen
“Most of the time I don’t have much fun. The rest of the time I don’t have any fun at all. - Woody Allen
“Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good. - Woody Allen
“I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose. - Woody Allen
“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. - Woody Allen
“I won’t take it personal. I’ll just kill myself. - Woody Allen
“Those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym. - Woody Allen
“The only thing standing between greatness and me is me. - Woody Allen
“How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? - Woody Allen
“I can’t listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland. - Woody Allen
“I don’t know the question, but sex is definitely the answer. - Woody Allen
“My brain: It`s my second favorite organ. - Woody Allen
“What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet. - Woody Allen
“Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality. - Woody Allen
“Chapter One. 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. Oh, I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be. - Woody Allen
“What a world. It could be so wonderful if it wasn’t for certain people. - Woody Allen
“I don’t respond well to mellow, you know what I mean, I have a tendency to… if I get too mellow, I ripen and then rot. - Woody Allen
“Having sex is like playing bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand. - Woody Allen
“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. - Woody Allen
“You’ll find as you go through life that great depth and smoldering sensuality don’t always win. - Woody Allen
“If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right. - Woody Allen
“I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it’s the government. - Woody Allen
“I can’t enjoy anything unless everybody is. If one guy is starving someplace, that puts a crimp in my evening. - Woody Allen
“What’ s the matter with me? Why can’t I be cool? - Woody Allen
“I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys. - Woody Allen
“Some guy hit my fender the other day, and I said unto him, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply’. But not in those words. - Woody Allen
“I had a great evening; it was like the Nuremberg Trials. - Woody Allen
