50 Funniest Woody Allen Quotes

Give Me A Reason

The Film: Love And Death (1975)

The Quote: "If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse."

Words Of Wisdom? One that’s likely to upset religious types, but still pretty funny...

A Life Divided

The Film: Annie Hall (1977)

The Quote: "I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable."

Words Of Wisdom? Definitely. We know we’re happy to be miserable. At least in comparison to the horrible.

Misery Loves Company

The Quote: "If my film makes one more person miserable, I'll feel I've done my job."

Words Of Wisdom? Hardly. If anything, Allen’s (finest) films are ones that make you both laugh. It’s only the duffs that make us truly miserable.

Crime Pays

The Film: Take The Money And Run (1969)

The Quote: "I think crime pays. The hours are good, you meet a lot of interesting people, you travel a lot."

Words Of Wisdom? So wise we’re actually considering a bit of a career change.

Sex And Death

The Quote: "The difference between sex and death is, with death you can do it alone and nobody’s going to make fun of you."

Words Of Wisdom? And if they do make fun of you, they’re not the kind of people you want around anyway…

All Talk

The Film: Hollywood Ending (2002)

The Quote: "Sex is better than talk. Ask anybody in this bar. Talk is what you suffer through so you can get to sex."

Words Of Wisdom? We’re sure there are a lot of people who agree with this...

More More More

The Film: Annie Hall (1977)

The Quote: "There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.’ Well, that's essentially how I feel about life."

Words Of Wisdom? In other words, you just can’t please some ruddy people.

Stay Together

The Film: Manhattan (1979)

The Quote: "I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics."

Words Of Wisdom?
Since when has Allen ever mated for life?

Yodel-Who?

The Quote: "I think universal harmony is a pipedream and it may be more productive to focus on more modest goals, like a ban on yodelling."

Words Of Wisdom? Surely we could achieve universal harmony simply by banning yodelling?

Incompetence

The Film: Shadows And Fog (1991)

The Quote: "I don't know enough to be incompetent."

Words Of Wisdom? We don’t know enough to know if this is wise.

Josh Winning has worn a lot of hats over the years. Contributing Editor at Total Film, writer for SFX, and senior film writer at the Radio Times. Josh has also penned a novel about mysteries and monsters, is the co-host of a movie podcast, and has a library of pretty phenomenal stories from visiting some of the biggest TV and film sets in the world. He would also like you to know that he "lives for cat videos..." Don't we all, Josh. Don't we all.