[ Of his love for his adoptive stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Farrow :] The heart wants what it wants. There’s no logic.

[ Harry Block, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] The most beautiful words in the English language are not “I love you,” but “It’s benign.”

[ Danny Rose, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] The man has an axe. There’s two of us. There’ll be four of us in no time.

[ Sandy Bates, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] You can’t control life. It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only . . . only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

[ Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, after having sex :] That was the most fun I ever had without laughing.

[ Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] That’s essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

[ Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, on Los Angeles :] I don’t want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.

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.

How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not “the thing with feathers.” The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.

[ Boris Grushenko, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] It’s not the quantity of your sexual relations that count, it’s the quality. On the other hand, if the quantity drops below once every eight months, I would definitely look into it.