"Today I saw a red-and-yellow sunset and thought, "How insignificant I am!" Of course, I thought that yesterday, too, and it rained. I was overcome with self-loathing and contemplated suicide again - this time by inhaling next to an insurance salesman."

"If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank."

"What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."

"Thought: Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage."

"He was on his way to see Harriet about the alimony payments. He still loved Harriet, even though while they were married she had systematically attempted to commit adultery with all the R's in the Manhattan telephone directory."

"What a wonderful thing, to be conscious! I wonder what the people in New Jersey do."

"He had been mistaken several times for Robert Redford, but on each occasion it was by a blind person."

"Once a lumberjack was about to chop down a tree, when he noticed a heart carved on it, with two names inside. Putting away his axe, he sawed down the tree instead. The point of that story escapes me, although six months later the lumberjack was fined for teaching a dwarf Roman numerals."

"Can we actually "know" the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown."

"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."

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

"As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree"— probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on."

"We have to take our possessions and flee. I'm very good at that. I was the men's freestyle fleeing champion two years in a row."

"And so I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Actually, make that "I run through the valley of the shadow of death" - in order to get OUT of the valley of the shadow of death more quickly, you see."

"In addition to our summer and winter estate, he owned a valuable piece of land. True, it was a small piece, but he carried it with him wherever he went."

"I was walking through the woods, thinking about Christ. If He was a carpenter, I wondered what He charged for bookshelves."

"If I don't kill him he'll make war all through Europe. But murder... the most foul of all crimes. What would Socrates say? All those Greeks were homosexuals. Boy, they must have had some wild parties. I bet they all took a house together in Crete for the summer. A: Socrates is a man. B: All men are mortal. C: All men are Socrates. That means all men are homosexuals. Heh... I'm not a homosexual. Once, some cossacks whistled at me. I happen to have the kind of body that excites both persuasions. You know, some men are heterosexual and some men are bisexual and some men don't think about sex at all, you know... they become lawyers."

"Sex without love is an empty experience. But as empty experiences go, it's one of the best."

"The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

"Human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun."

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But, then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness — I hope you're getting this down."

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

"I'm not really the heroic type. I was beat up by Quakers."

"Oh, he was probably a member of the National Rifle Association. It was a group that helped criminals get guns so they could shoot citizens. It was a public service."

"My brain: it's my second favorite organ."

"When it comes to sex there are certain things that should always be left unknown, and with my luck, they probably will be."

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

"I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and I was able to go through War and Peace in 20 minutes. It's about Russia."

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

"Allen: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it? Woman: Yes, it is. Allen: What does it say to you? Woman: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless, bleak straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos. Allen: What are you doing Saturday night? Woman: Committing suicide. Allen: What about Friday night?"

"On bisexuality: It immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night."

"Love is the answer. But while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions."

"There have been times when I've thought of suicide but with my luck it'd probably be a temporary solution."

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

"To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition."

"Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it."

"It figures you've got to hate yourself if you've got any integrity at all."

"Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer."

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

"What a world. It could be so wonderful if it wasn't for certain people."

"[The universe is] haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent."

"Change is death."

"Some guy hit my car fender the other day, and I said unto him, "Be fruitful and multiply." But not in those words."

"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."

"How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?"

"We're worth a lot of dough. Whatever you see is antiques. This thing here. This is from — I don't remember exactly. I think it's the Renaissance or the Magna Carta or something. But that's where it's from."

"I'm not saying I didn't enjoy myself, but I didn't."

"As a filmmaker, I'm not interested in 9/11 [...] it's too small, history overwhelms it. The history of the world is like: He kills me, I kill him, only with different cosmetics and different castings. So in 2001, some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other. Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again."

"I have no apprehension whatsoever. I've been through this so many times. And I found that one way or the other, your life doesn't change at all. Which is sad, in a way. Because the people love your film... nothing great happens. And people hate your film... nothing terrible happens. Many years ago, I would... I would... a film of mine would open, and it would get great reviews, and I would go down and look at the movie theater. There'd be a line around the block. And when a film is reviled, you open a film and people say "Oh, it's the stupidest thing, it's the worst movie." You think: oh, nobody's going to ever speak to you again. But, it doesn't happen. Nobody cares. You know, they read it and they say "Oh, they hated your film." You care, at the time. But they don't. Nobody else cares. They're not interested. They've got their own lives, and their own problems, and their own shadows on their lungs, and their x-rays. And, you know, they've got their own stuff they're dealing with.... So, I'm just never nervous about it."

"I made the statement years ago which is often quoted that 80 percent of life is showing up. People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn't do it, that's why they don't accomplish a thing, they don't do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say [sic] my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me."