Woody Allen: Thing

Woody Allen is American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician. Explore interesting quotes on thing.
Woody Allen: 458   quotes 31   likes

“Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again.”

Woody Allen

Interview in Der Spiegel, 2005-06-20 (as quoted by the New York Post) http://www.imdb.com/news/wenn/2005-06-29/
Context: As a filmmaker, I'm not interested in 9/11 [... ] it's too small, history overwhelms it. The history of the world is like: He kills me, I kill him, only with different cosmetics and different castings. So in 2001, some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other. Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again.

History , Question

“The only thing standing between me and greatness is me.”

Woody Allen

“You know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it's real difficult in life”

Woody Allen

Source: Annie Hall: Screenplay

Life , Art , Perfection

“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.”

Woody Allen book Side Effects

"The UFO Menace".
Side Effects (1980)

People

“How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not "the thing with feathers." The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.”

Woody Allen Without Feathers

Source: Without Feathers

Hope

“Sex and death. Two things that come but once in my lifetime, but at least after death you're not nauseous.”

Woody Allen

Sleeper (1973)

Death , Sex

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

Woody Allen

Interview for The Collider (2008) http://collider.com/entertainment/interviews/article.asp/aid/8878/tcid/1/pg/2.

Life , People , Way , 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.”

Woody Allen

[Allen, Woody, France Roche, Woody Allen, ou L'Anhedoniste; le Plus Drole du Monde, New York, 1979, France 2, 05 January 2013]
Others

Love , Life , Money , Pain

“Burt: Do you care even about the Holocaust or do you think it never happened?Harry: Not only do I know that we lost six million, but the scary thing is that records are made to be broken.”

Woody Allen

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Thinking

“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

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972)

Sex

“Hey listen — I've proved a lot of things. That's how I pay my rent. Theories and little observations. A puckish remark now and then. Occasional maxims. It beats picking olives, but let's not get carried away.”

Woody Allen book Side Effects

Side Effects (1980), My Apology

“The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife — a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held. On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.”

Woody Allen Without Feathers

"The Early Essays".
Without Feathers (1975)

Death , Fear , Lying , Problem

“I feel sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five, it's fantastic.”

Woody Allen

Standup Comic (1999)

People , Beauty , Sex , Feeling

“We're worth a lot of dough. Whatever you see is antiques. This thing here. This is from — I don't remember exactly. I think it's the Renaissance or the Magna Carta or something. But that's where it's from.”

Woody Allen

Small Time Crooks (2001).

Thinking

“A lot of things have happened in my private life recently that I thought we could review tonight.”

Woody Allen

Standup Comic (1999)

Life

“What a wonderful thing, to be conscious! I wonder what the people in New Jersey do.”

Woody Allen Without Feathers

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

People

“You start to think, when you’re younger, how important everything is and how things have to go right—your job, your career, your life, your choices, and all of that. Then, after a while, you start to realise that – I’m talking the big picture here – eventually you die, and eventually the sun burns out and the earth is gone, and eventually all the stars and all the planets in the entire universe go, disappear, and nothing is left at all. Nothing – Shakespeare and Beethoven and Michelangelo gone. And you think to yourself that there’s a lot of noise and sound and fury – and where’s it going? It’s not going any place… Now, you can’t actually live your life like that, because if you do you just sit there and – why do anything? Why get up in the morning and do anything? So I think it’s the job of the artist to try and figure out why, given this terrible fact, you want to go on living.”

Woody Allen

Interview with France 24 (2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MsuqvLIttk.

Life , Star , Thinking , Universe