[sup]Mods: Wasn’t sure whether to put this here or into GQ. Please move if CS isn’t the proper place for this question.[/sup]
Aphorism collections typically include plenty of phrases credited to Woody Allen - reality being the only place where you can get a decent steak, and stuff like that. The variety of those sayings makes me wonder when and where he said all that. Are they all quotations from his movies? Some of them to me seem difficult to fit into a screenplay. My guess is rather he gave interviews or lectures and dropped the remarks there, or probably he wrote memoirs or whatever, but then again he must have written LOTS of memoirs.
Same question with Einstein quotations - I’d be curious to know where he said them.
Woody Allen was a standup comic for many years and also wrote essays which have since been collected in book form. Some of his quotes appear in his old act, an essay or two and even sometimes in a movie. Then there are standup like appearances on talk shows like Dick Cavett, etc.
Allen also wrote several pieces for The New Yorker and other magazines, which were collected in the books Without Feathers and … um, something else, my mind just went blank there.
Anyway, at least one of those pieces was specifically a collection of aphorisms.
Allen wrote three books of essays. There are a lot of quotable stuff from his stand-up routines and his movies (and remember that a lot of his movies have characters tossing off quips that work very well as out-of-context quotations). There’s also some quotes that come from interviews. If you’ll give the specific qutoes that you thinking of, we might be able to tell you where they come from. Oh, but before you do that, try looking in the quotes section of his movies on the IMDb. I think that there’s a search feature on the IMDb that allows you to look up quotes.
He also wrote for a comic strip in which he was a character (frequently talking to a woman sometimes identified as his sister). They were mostly one-liners; I don’t know if they were from previously-published works.
My favorite quote:
WOMAN: A poem is the right words in the right order.
WOODY: So is a dictionary.
WOMAN: But would you read a dictionary to your girlfriend?
WOODY: Only if she didn’t know the meaning of the word “fellatio.”
I’m pretty sure that Woody Allen had nothing to do with the comic strip, except to the extent that the real author of the strip, Stuart Hample, occasionally adapted some of Allen’s old lines for individual cartoons.
