The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader

Woody Allen - accomplished film actor and director, brilliant monologist and gifted prose stylist. In this book, selections from his best, wittiest, and most profound work in every area have been gathered together for the first time. The excerpts from the published and never-before-published work range from one-liners to memorable on-screen exchanges to essays, and are drawn from Woody's stand-up routines (which have never appeared in print before), his classic New Yorker pieces, his screenplays, film outtakes, magazine articles, plays, and interviews. Here is vintage Woody Allen on the topics that have dominated his work for more than thirty years: Intellectuals ("They're like the Mafia, they only kill their own"); Analysts ("My poor analyst got so frustrated. The guy finally put in a salad bar"); Love ("Should I marry W.? Not if she won't tell me the other letters in her name"); Work ("Show business is dog eat dog. It's worse than dog eat dog. It's dog doesn't return dog's phone calls"); Death ("I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying"); and much more. Here is marvelous dialogue from twenty-six original screenplays, including Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Play It Again, Sam, Broadway Danny Rose, Zelig, Radio Days, Manhattan, Husbands and Wives, and all the others. Here are highlights from monologues, including the first one he ever recorded in March, 1964; Woody dicussing his grandfather ("On his deathbed he sold me this pocket watch"); remembering a moth who ate his sports jacket; and telling the now-classic tale of the time he shot a moose. Also included are excerpts from more than sixty essays: "No Kaddish for Weinstein," "Confessions of a Burglar," "The UFO Menace," "The Discovery and Use of the Fake Ink Blot," "A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets," and "If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists," in which a distraught Dutch dentist named Vincent writes in anguish t