Woody Allen on Life

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

"Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon."

"My love life is terrible. The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty."

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

"My one regret in life is that I am not someone else."

"You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ."

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

"I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I'm never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts."

"Talent is luck. The important thing in life is courage."

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

"I don't believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear."

"Death is like a colonoscopy, the problem is that life is like the prep day."

"Marriage? That's for life! It's like cement!"

"Life is like a concentration camp... you can't leave without dying."

"Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable. The horrible would be terminal cases, blind people, criples. The miserable is everyone else. When you go through life you should be thankful that you're miserable."

"I have learned one thing. As Woody says, "Showing up is 80 percent of life." Sometimes it's easier to hide home in bed. I've done both. - 1977 August 21, New York Times, Section 2: Arts and Leisure, He's Woody Allen's Not-So-Silent Partner by Susan Braudy, Page 11 , New York."

"I do not believe in God," I told him. "For if there is a God, then tell me, Uncle, why is there poverty and baldness? Why do some men go through life immune to a thousand mortal enemies of the race, while others get a migraine that lasts for weeks? Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?"

"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."

"No wonder some people commit suicide! Why not end this absurdity? Why go through with this hollow charade called life? Why, except that somewhere within us a voice says, "Live." Always, from some inner region, we hear the command,"Keep living!" Cloquet recognized the voice; it was his insurance salesman. Naturally, he thought - Fishbein doesn't want to pay off."

"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."

"The film studios learned to our dismay but to their pleasure that if they spent $200 million making a film they could make half a billion on it. So they were not interested anymore in quality films... They can't afford to be that risky at those prices. Consequently you're getting a lot of remakes, sequels, dopey comedies full of toilet jokes..."

"This is my perspective and has always been my perspective on life: I have a very grim, pessimistic view of it. I always have, since I was a little boy. It hasn't gotten worse with age or anything. I do feel that it's a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself."