Apropos of Nothing

by Woody Allen

And yet with all the verbal carnage, they stayed married for seventy years—out of spite, I suspect. Still, I’m sure they loved each other in their own way, a way known perhaps only to a few headhunting tribes in Borneo.

“Nothing bothers me,” he would brag. “You’re too stupid for anything to bother you,” Mom would patiently try to explain.

So she sells her hair to buy him a watch fob and he sells his watch to buy combs for her hair. The moral I drew was you’re always safer giving cash.

I ran into the same question that bugged the former prince of Denmark: Why suffer the slings and arrows when I can just wet my nose, insert it into the light socket, and never have to deal with anxiety, heartache, or my mother’s boiled chicken ever again?

The rest is history—but so is the Holocaust.

Probably would have gone into a fugue state if I had come face-to-face with a steer in any other form than adjacent to a baked potato.

They asked me my goal in life. I said, to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race and see if it could be mass-produced in plastic.

I didn’t think a shrink was the worst idea, since despite all my creative interests and promising start as a comedy writer along with all of the love I was shown growing up, I still experienced some moderate feelings of anxiety—like when you’re buried alive.

But the arguments we had over free will and monads, while heated, were never as combatative as the ones we had over our marriage. I knew I was in trouble when, in one philosophical discussion, Harlene proved I didn’t exist.

As the clock hit around six and both men planned to go home, Sid turned to me in that grandiose way he had and said, “And you, you’re hired.” I rode down with Gelbart and I said, “I’m hired?” and he said, “If you’ll work for the minimum.” “I’ll pay the minimum to be in a room with you two guys,” I said.

Danny, so secretive, would call and say, “Can’t talk about it on the phone, meet me at Hansen’s.” I’d say, “Is it a writing job, or do I have to pass microfilm?”

Incidentally, it was not that I was a cheapskate when it came to tipping. I just didn’t grasp the finer points and once tipped a process server who knocked on my door and handed me a summons.

I can’t remember if the girl and the guy broke up or he moved out of town or what but since she was a neighbor, my wife and I invited her over for dinner. She came, the three of us spent the evening talking, watching TV maybe. She was quite pretty and very charming and I didn’t realize how much she impressed me until I awoke in the middle of the night with a burning desire to marry her and live on the moon.

I know as much about wine as I know about horses or bipolar women. The trick is to position your eyes so it looks like you’re checking the year on the menu but really checking the prices. Stay with the most expensive you can afford.

I had moved out and taken a very romantic apartment with a fireplace in the bathroom, not that I ever used it. I used the bathroom, not the fireplace.

As Jack Rollins always said, don’t choose projects for the money, choose artistically, concentrate on doing good work, and the money will come.

He explained that the knit design in those type sweaters were all different so that if the wearer drowned at sea, his bloated, disfigured body could be recognized by the family knit pattern. From that moment on, I was confident that if I ever fell into the Seine and they fished out my corpse, my mother would be able to identify me and cancel my magazine subscriptions.

My theory, after years of being in the movies, is that the problem is almost always the script. It’s much harder to write than direct, and a mediocre director can make a good movie from a fine script but a great director cannot make a lousy script into a good movie.

If you had bet on me from Take the Money and Run to today, you’d be ahead. Not way ahead but enough to buy that fishing rod you’ve always wanted.

Gordon liked his little taste of John Barleycorn, and as it got dark early those winter days in the Hamptons and there was nothing to do, he would sample a wee dram of Courvoisier at five. Just enough to go blind.

Most of what she said about her mother caused me to twig on the early red flags, which billowed feverishly in the turbulent winds of retrospect, if you’ll excuse my bid for a National Book Award.

One only has to study the fundamentals of bankruptcy law to envision the box office potential.

If I died right now I couldn’t complain—and neither would a lot of other people.

I’m eighty-four; my life is almost half over.

I like making movies, but if I never made another one it would not bother me. I’m happy to write plays. If no one would produce them, I’m happy to write books. If no one would publish them, I’m happy to write for myself, confident that if the writing is good, it will someday be discovered and read by people, and if it is bad writing, better no one sees it.