the wit and wisdom of woody allen

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according to woody allen, AKA mr. le jazz hot:

I'm not afraid of dying . . . I just don't want to be there when it happens. On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily as lying down. There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman? I can't really come up with a good argument to choose life over death. Except that I'm too scared.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.

Join the army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill 'em.

I don't believe in an afterlife, although I'm bringing along a change of underwear.
Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends. If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever. To you, I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition. If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank. Man was made in God's image. Do you really think God has red hair and glasses?

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.

I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

I'm a practicing heterosexual, although bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night. Having sex is like playing bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.

80% of success is showing up.

I love Woody Allen. He's a very talented man.

Thanks for the quotes! I have been a Woody Allen fan for a long time. If you haven't seen any of his stand-up comedy, be sure to check it out. I heard him interviewed recently in which he says that he is not at all like the neurotic character he plays in his films. He also said he was influenced by Bob Hope movies. His earliest films are among my favorites.

BTW, I don't doubt that he wrote the one liner about time, but WikiQuote said that the origin is in dispute (Einstein?) Do you have a good source to confirm it was Woody's?

i am just a cut-and-paste kinda guy, so i can't say who really said what in the beginning of it all. for all we know, einstein may not have been the first person to say something about time, there were other scientists who had been working on similar things as him when he became famous. there is never just one person with a given idea, not on a world as big as the one we all live on. woody probably heard it from some other source and found it useful to parrot.
and if you want an interesting look at his opinion of his own work-

"If my film makes one more person miserable, I'll feel I've done my job."
"I was just a poor student. I had no interest in it. When I make a film the tacit contract with the audience is that I will give them some entertainment and not bore them. I have to do that. I just lay a message on them. Great filmmakers, like Ingmar Bergman or Akira Kurosawa or Federico Fellini, they're very entertaining, their films are fun."
"Stanley Kubrick was a great artist. I say this all the time and people think I'm being facetious. I'm not. Kubrick was a guy who obsessed over details and did 100 takes, and you know, I don't feel that way. If I'm shooting a film and it's 6 o'clock at night and I've got a take, and I think I might be able to get a better take if I stayed, but the Knicks tipoff is at 7:30, then that's it. The crews love working on my movies because they know they'll be home by 6."

"I never wanted movies to be an end. I wanted them to be a means so that I could have a decent life -- meet attractive women, go out on dates, live decently. Not opulently, but with some security. I feel the same way now. A guy like Steven Spielberg will go live in the desert to make a movie, or Martin Scorsese will make a picture in India and set up camp and live there for four months. I mean, for me, if I'm not shooting in my neighborhood, it's annoying. I have no commitment to my work in that sense. No dedication."

"The greatest question is: Is there an afterlife, and how far is it from downtown and can they break a twenty?"

My favorite of his articles (as collected in several books) was one purporting to be excerpts from Allen's diary:

"Emily Dickinson was wrong. Hope is not 'the thing with feathers'. The thing with feathers turns out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich."

That might be from a short book of essays by Woody called "Without Feathers." It has been too many years since I read it, so I don't remember. I do remember that I liked the book. Of course, it could have been included in more than one book.

My favorite Allen scene. He's in an apartment with a girl, sitting on a bed changing the white light bulb for a red one.

"Not only is this more erotic we can develop photographs as well".

There's also a wonderful aspie moment in one of the movies where they are all gathered around the bed of someone who is dying. Finally the person dies and there is then an endless discussion about where they should go and eat.

Vanilla_Slice

Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone I
love.
(Annie Hall)

"I will not have to refer to my French fried potatoes as freedom fries and I will not have to freedom kiss my wife when all I want to do is French kiss her."
Promotion video over of the US boycott of France's anti war stance

rotflmao!

priceless