Comedians From The United States

"Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run."

"I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature, but I never saw a policeman interfere in the matter and I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done him."

"He was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie."

"I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."

"I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county."

"They called me mad... But it was I - yes I - who discovered the link between excessive masturbation and entry into politics!"

"In Woody Allen, the Republicans quickly discovered the genuine article, a sexual heretic...Of course it is absurd to suggest that Americans do not approve of love. They do, with the same highly trained enthusiasm with which they approve of a sense of humour. Their desire to preserve this infantile attitude is what makes them so frightened of feeling sympathy for Woody Allen. They do not wish to acknowledge that true love might also be socially disruptive, so they insist that the socially disruptive is not true love. That is why it is so crucial that Woody Allen be thought not only immoral, but insincere."

"If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now."

"I don't even think Woody does comedy. I think he does dramas with jokes. They're all sad at their core."

"I think the best thing for writers to do with the movies is to keep their trap shut. Woody Allen said, "Take the money and run," and he's right."

"Without Feathers, a collection of Woody Allen’s early short stories, was a prized possession."

"Woody Allen is currently having non-incest with a non-daughter for whom he is a non-father because they have no concept of families...it's a weird environment out there."

"This is Woody Allen's 41st film. He writes his films himself, and directs them with wit and grace. I consider him a treasure of the cinema."

"With the possible exception of What's Up, Tiger Lily (1966), the schlocky Japanese spy movie to which he attached his own, sidesplitting English soundtrack, no Woody Allen movie has ever been more or less serious than another of his works. He's always been serious. It's the audiences who have been frivolous. In Zelig he reassures us that he can still be funny and moving without making the sort of insistent filmic references in which he delights but which can be infuriating to others. Zelig is a nearly perfect — and perfectly original — Woody Allen comedy."

"In this land of unlimited opportunity, a place where, to paraphrase Woody Allen, any man or woman can realize greatness as a patient or as a doctor, we have only one commercial American filmmaker who consistently speaks with his own voice. That is Woody Allen, gag writer, musician, humorist, philosopher, playwright, stand-up comic, film star, film writer and film director."

"At the time that I worked with Woody Allen, I knew nothing of the allegations. At the time, I said it's a very painful and complicated situation for the family, which I hope they have the ability to resolve....If these allegations need to be re-examined which, in my understanding, they've been through court, then I'm a big believer in the justice system and setting legal precedents,....If the case needs to be reopened, I am absolutely, wholeheartedly in support of that."

"You know, the whole American culture is going down the drain, you can't turn on a television set and see anything, or walk in the street and not find garbage, or neighborhoods that were formerly beautiful now have McDonald's in them, and it's all a part of an enormous degeneration of culture in the United States. People that exist in that culture are forced to make moral decisions all the time about their lives, their occupations, their love-lives, and they make decisions that are commensurate with what's happening to them in this culture, and it's too bad that that's happening because that's what Manhattan is about, that New York used to be such a great city, so wonderful, and it has to fight every day for its survival against the encroachment of all this terrible ugliness that is gradually overcoming all the big cities in America. This ugliness comes from a culture that has no spiritual center, a culture that has money and education, but no sense of being at peace with the world, no sense of purpose in life. They don't know what they're doing, or why they're here. They have no religious center, they have no philosophical center, and so they act, they do what's expedient at the moment. They have no long view of society. They only have the view of quick money, and kill the pain of the moment, and so instead of dealing with the real problems that exist, that are complicated, they sweep them under the rug by turning on the television set, or taking cocaine, or doing many things that enable them to escape confrontation with the unpleasant realities of the world."

"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."

"Woody Allen later wrote in a letter: "My observation was that once a person actually completed a play or a novel, he was well on his way to getting it produced or published, as opposed to a vast majority of people who tell me their ambition is to write, but who strike out on the very first level and indeed never write the play or book. In the midst of the conversation, as I'm now trying to recall, I did say that 80 percent of success is showing up." - 1989 August 13, New York Times, On Language: The Elysian Fields by William Safire."

"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 (ProQuest Page 83), New York."

"To a man standing on the shore, time passes quicker than to a man on a boat — especially if the man on the boat is with his wife."

"Bidnick gorges himself on Viagra, but the dosage makes him hallucinate and causes him to imagine he is Pliny the Elder."

"I was supremely confident my flair for atmosphere and characterization would sparkle alongside the numbing mulch ground out by studio hacks. Certainly the space atop my mantel might be better festooned by a gold statuette than by the plastic dipping bird that now bobbed there ad infinitum."

"As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness."

"She quarreled with the nanny and accused her of brushing Misha's teeth sideways rather than up and down."

"I have also reviewed my own financial obligations, which have puffed up recently like a hammered thumb."

"With that, he scribbled in an additional ninety thousand dollars on the estimate, which had waxed to the girth of the Talmud while rivaling it in possible interpretations."

"And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly, would certain restaurants still require a jacket?"

"How could I not have known that there are little things the size of "Planck length" in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theater how hard it would be to find."

"It is a gorgeous gold pocket watch, however, I'm proud of it. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch."

"When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room."

"I'm not a drinker — my body will not tolerate spirits. I had two Martinis on New Year's Eve and I tried to hijack an elevator and fly it to Cuba."

"I tended to place my wife under a pedestal."

"I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me."

"I was in analysis. I was suicidal. As a matter of fact, I would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss."

"Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in the bath and she'd come in and sink my boats."

"A fast word about oral contraception. I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said "no.""

"I feel sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five, it's fantastic."

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

"Harry: All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it."

"The Devil: You want me to turn the air-conditioning on? Harry: You have air-conditioning in Hell? The Devil: Sure, it fucks up the ozone layer!"

"Doris: You have no values. With you it's all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm. Harry: Hey, in France I could run for office with that slogan, and win!"

"Harry: (On being called a self-hating Jew) Hey, I may hate myself, but not because I'm Jewish."

"Harry: Tradition is the illusion of permanence."

"Harry: No, I don't think you're paranoid. I think you're the opposite of paranoid. I think you walk around with the insane delusion that people like you."

"Burt: Do you care even about the Holocaust or do you think it never happened? Harry: Not only do I know that we lost six million, but the scary thing is that records are made to be broken."

"Cookie: What are you sad about? Harry: I'm spiritually bankrupt. I'm empty. Cookie: What do you mean? Harry: I'm frightened. I got no soul, you know what I mean? Let me put it this way: when I was younger it was less scary waiting for Lefty than it is waiting for Godot. Cookie: You lost me! Harry: You know that the universe is coming apart? You know about that? You know what a black hole is? Cookie: Yeah. That's how I make my living."

"Harry: Every hooker I ever speak to tells me that it beats the hell out of waitressing. Waitressing's gotta be the worst fucking job in the world."

"Harry: The most beautiful words in the English language aren't "I love you" but "it's benign.""

"Harry: You think the President of the United States wants to fuck every woman he meets?... Well, bad example."