Woody Allen: Want

“You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”

“The heart wants what it wants.”

“I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead.”

“I love nature, I just don't want to get any of it on me.”

“I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception. I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said 'No.”

“It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.”

“I don't know what I want, but I know what I don't want”

“Death doesn't really worry me that much, I'm not frightened about it… I just don't want to be there when it happens.”

“In my next life I want to live backwards. Start out dead and finish off as an orgasm.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.”

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