"If you don't fail now and again, it's a sign you're playing it safe."
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Quote collection
Woody Allen quotes (page 28 of 41)
818 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I can make films. And some of them come out good, and some of them come out better, and some of them come out worse. But I've been very lucky over the years to be able to sustain the length of career that I've had."
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"There's a tacit agreement between myself and the audience that I will entertain them when they buy their ticket, and I've been the one that has screwed that up. Once in while I indulge myself and try something else, and I keep my fingers crossed that it will come out good and there'll be enough people who will enjoy it, but that doesn't often happen."
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"He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion... no, make that: he - he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yes. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin."
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"Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they leave things."
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"Curiosity, that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It's our own hearts and minds."
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"I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying."
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"I was walking through the woods, thinking about Christ. If He was a carpenter, I wondered what He charged for bookshelves."
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"I think that the tendency for most people is to fall back on a comic interpretation of things because things are so sad, so terrible. If you didn't laugh you'd kill yourself. But the truth of the matter is that existence in general is very very tragic, very very sad, very brutal and very unhappy."
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"With films, I just scribble a couple of notes for a scene. You don't have to do any writing at all, you just have your notes for the scene, which are written with the actors and the camera in mind. The actual script is a necessity for casting and budgeting, but the end product often doesn't bear much resemblance to the script--at least in my case."
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"I didn't know he was dead; I thought he was British."
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"I spend a lot of time idly. I go to sporting events, play my clarinet. I practise. But if you work every day, a certain amount on a steady basis, the work accumulates."
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"You are much more dependent on luck than you think. People say if you want to have a good relationship, you have to work at it. But you never hear it about anything you really like, about sailing or going to soccer games."
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"Have you ever noticed that good people sleep better, but bad people seem to have more fun when they're awake?"
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"I love baseball. You know, it doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s just very beautiful to watch."
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"I do the movies just for myself like an institutionalized person who basket-weaves. Busy fingers are happy fingers. I don't care about the films. I don't care if they're flushed down the toilet after I die."
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"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment."
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"People think I'm an artist because my films lose money."
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"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..."
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"In the event of war, I'm a hostage."
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