Alvy Singer quotes

View Quote There's an old joke. Uh, two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and such small portions." Well, 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.

View Quote The other important joke for me is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx but I think it appears originally in Freud's Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious - and it goes like this. I'm paraphrasing. I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member. That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.

View Quote I hope to become the balding virile type, you know, as opposed to, say, the distinguished gray, unless I'm neither of those two. Unless I'm one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism.

View Quote Annie and I broke up. And I still can't get my mind around that. You know, I keep sifting the pieces of the relationship through my mind, and examining my life and trying to figure out where did the screwup come, you know. A year ago, we were in love, you know.

View Quote They did not take me in the Army. I was, um, interestingly enough, I was, I was 4-P. Yes. In the, in the event of war, I'm a hostage.

View Quote You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said, 'Did you eat yet or what?' And Tom Christie said, 'No, JEW?' Not 'Did you?'...JEW eat? JEW? You get it? JEW eat?

View Quote Oh that's OK, we can walk to the curb from here!

View Quote 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.

View Quote What? Are we driving through plutonium?

View Quote What I wouldn't give for a large sock with horse manure in it. ...What do you do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you? It's just maddening.

View Quote Maybe we should just call the police. Dial 911. It's the lobster squad. It'll turn up in our bed at night. Talk to him. You speak shellfish...Annie, there's a big lobster behind the refrigerator. I can't get it out...Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side?...We should have gotten steaks, 'cause they don't have legs. They don't run around.

View Quote Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat, college.

View Quote [on why he doesn't drive] I got a license but I have too much hostility.

View Quote [to Annie] You're a wonderful tennis player...You're the worst driver I've ever seen in my life...and I love what you're wearing.

View Quote What did you do? Grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting? Your Grammy?

View Quote Yeah, you're really popular - I can see. What, you got the plague of something?

View Quote My Grammy never gave gifts, you know. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks.

View Quote Yeah, why not? Because we're just going to go home later, right, and there's gonna be all that tension, you know, we never kissed before. And I'll never know when to make the right move or anything. So we'll kiss now and get it over with, and then we'll go eat. OK? We'll digest our food better.

View Quote I don't use any major hallucinogenics...Five years ago at a party, I tried to take my pants off over my head.

View Quote I'm obsessed with uh, with death, I think. Big - big subject with me, yeah. I have a very pessimistic view of life. You should know this about me if we're gonna go out. You know, I - I feel that life is - is divided up into the horrible and the miserable. Those are the two categories, you know. The - the horrible would be like, um, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. You know, and the miserable is everyone else. That's - that's - so - so - when you go through life - you should be thankful that you're miserable because you're very lucky to be miserable.

View Quote [to Annie] You are extremely sexy, unbelievably sexy...You know what you are, you're polymorphously perverse...you're exceptional in bed because you got - you get pleasure in every part of your body when I touch it...Like the tip of your nose, and if I stroke your teeth or your kneecaps...you get excited.

View Quote Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes I have to invent, of course I - I do, don't you think I do?

View Quote I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. When I was thrown out, my mother, who was an emotionally high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles. I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and 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.

View Quote I'm making excellent progress. Pretty soon, when I lie down on his couch, I won't have to wear the lobster bib.

View Quote You know, even as a kid, I always went for the wrong women. I think that's my problem. When my mother took me to see Snow White, everyone fell in love with Snow White. I immediately fell for the Wicked Queen.

View Quote I can't get with any religion that advertises in Popular Mechanics.

View Quote [to Annie] Don't you have a can of Raid in the house? I told you a thousand times. You should always keep a lot of insect spray. You never know who's gonna crawl over.

View Quote Did you go to a rock concert?...Oh yeah really, really? How'd you like it? Was it, was it heavy? Did it achieve total heaviosity?

View Quote Why don't you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?...Are you going with a right-wing rock 'n roll star?

View Quote Darling, I've been killing spiders since I was thirty, OK?

View Quote Honey, there's a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick.

View Quote I was a great athlete...I was all-school yard.

View Quote You know, I don't think I could take a mellow evening because I - I don't respond well to mellow. You know what I mean? I have a tendency to - if I get too mellow, I - I ripen and then rot, you know.

View Quote The incredible thing about it is, I'm paying for her analysis and she's making progress, and I'm getting screwed...It's absurd. She's making progress and I'm not making any progress. And her progress is killing my progress.

View Quote She's a 10, Max, and that's great for you because you're - you're used to two's, aren't you?

View Quote They give awards for that kind of music? I thought just earplugs...They do nothing but give out awards. I can't believe it. Greatest Fascist Dictator - Adolf Hitler!

View Quote You know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art, because it's real difficult in life.

View Quote After that, it got pretty late and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her...and I thought of that old joke, you know, the, this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken,' and uh, the doctor says, 'Well why don't you turn him in?' And the guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd and - but uh, I guess we keep going through it...because...most of us need the eggs.