1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Woody Allen

Woody Allen Quotes
page 5

Heywood "Woody" Allen is an American director, writer, actor, and comedian whose career spans more than six decades. He began his career as a comedy writer in the 1950s, writing jokes and scripts for television and publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, he performed as a stand-up comedian, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes, where he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he maintains is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004 Comedy Central ranked Allen fourth on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians, while a UK survey ranked Allen the third-greatest comedian.By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into dramatic material influenced by European art cinema during the 1970s, and alternating between comedies and dramas to the present. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late 1970s. Allen often stars in his films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. Some of the best-known of his over 50 films are Annie Hall , Manhattan , Hannah and Her Sisters , Crimes and Misdemeanors , and Midnight in Paris . In 2007 he said Stardust Memories , The Purple Rose of Cairo , and Match Point were his best films. Critic Roger Ebert described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema".Allen has received many accolades and honors. He has won four Academy Awards: three for Best Original Screenplay and one for Best Director. He also garnered nine British Academy Film Awards. His screenplay for Annie Hall was named the funniest screenplay by the Writers Guild of America in its list of the "101 Funniest Screenplays". In 2011 PBS televised the film biography Woody Allen: A Documentary on its series American Masters. Wikipedia  

✵ 1. December 1935
Woody Allen photo
Woody Allen: 229   quotes 31   likes

Woody Allen Quotes

“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

As quoted in the New York Times, That’s Amore: Italy as Muse: Woody Allen on Italian Movies and ‘To Rome With Love’ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/movies/woody-allen-on-italian-movies-and-to-rome-with-love.html?_r=1&smid=FB-nytimes&WT.mc_id=MO-E-FB-SM-LIN-TAI-061912-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click, June 15, 2012.
Others

Money , Way , Country , Happiness

“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

Love and Death (1975)

God , Thinking , Evil

“Change is death.”

Woody Allen

Husbands and Wives.

Death , Change

“I made the statement years ago which is often quoted that 80 percent of life is showing up.”

Woody Allen

People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say [sic] my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.
Interview for The Collider (2008) http://collider.com/entertainment/interviews/article.asp/aid/8878/tcid/1/pg/2.

Life , Quotes

“I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.”

Woody Allen
Universe , Way , People

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

Woody Allen

Standup Comic (1999)

“He had been mistaken several times for Robert Redford, but on each occasion it was by a blind person.”

Woody Allen Without Feathers

"No Kaddish for Weinstein".
Without Feathers (1975)

Time , Personality