[repeated line] La-dee-da, la-dee-da. — Annie Hall

"Theres an old joke: two elderly women are at a Catskill 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, thats essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and its all over much too quickly. The the other joke important joke for me is one thats usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think it appears originally in Freuds Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. And it goes like this, Im paraphrasing: Um, I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member. Thats the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women. You know, lately, the strangest things have been going through my mind, cause I turned 40, and I guess Im going through a life crisis or something, I dunno, and Im not worried about aging, Im not one of those characters, you know I, well Im balding slightly on top, thats about the worst you can say about me. I um I think Im gonna get better as I get older. You know, I think Im gonna be the balding virile type, you know, as opposed to say, the um distinguished gray, for instance, you know, unless Im neither of those two. Unless Im one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism. Annie and I broke up, and I still cant get my mind around that, you know, I keep sifting the pieces of the relationship through my mind and and examining my life and trying to figure out where did the screw up come, you know, and mm a year ago, we were in love, you know, and and and I just, and its funny, Im not a Im not a morose type. Im not a depressive character, you know, I was a reasonably happy kid, I guess, I was brought up in Brooklyn during World War II."

"[voiceover] My analyst says I exaggerate my childhood memories, but I swear, I was brought up underneath the roller coaster in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. Maybe that accounts for my personality, which is a little nervous, I think. You know, I have a hyperactive imagination. My mind tends to jump around a little, and uh I I I have some trouble between fantasy and reality. My father ran the bumper car concession. Th-there he is, and there I am. Right. I I used to get my aggression out through those cars all the time. I remember the staff at our public school. You know, we had a saying, uh but, "Those who cant do, teach, and those who cant teach, teach gym." And uh, of course, those who couldnt do anything, I think, were assigned to our school. I must say, I always thought my schoolmates were idiots. Melvyn Greenglass, you know, his fat little face and Henrietta Farrell, just Miss Perfect all the time and uh Ivan Ackerman, always the wrong answer. Always."

"After that it got pretty late, and, we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. 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, this guy goes to his psychiatrist and says, "Doc, my brothers crazy. He thinks hes a chicken." And the doctor says, "Well why dont you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess thats pretty much now how I feel about relationships– you know, theyre totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but, I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs."

"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."

"You know, even as a kid, I always went for the wrong women. I think thats 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."

"A relationship, I think, is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark."