Memorable quotes for
Manhattan (1979) More at IMDbPro »

[Looking at old meat]
Isaac Davis: Corn beef should not be blue

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Isaac Davis: I feel like we're in a Noel Coward play. Someone should be making martinis.

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Isaac Davis: I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics.

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Isaac Davis: Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Beneath his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be...

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Tracy: Let's fool around. Let's do it some strange way that you've always wanted to, but nobody would do with you.

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Isaac Davis: My ex-wife left me for another woman.

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Isaac Davis: She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father, can you believe that? I'm dating a girl, wherein, I can beat up her father.

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Yale: You are so self-righteous, you know. I mean we're just people. We're just human beings, you know? You think you're God.
Isaac Davis: I... I gotta model myself after someone.

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Isaac Davis: This is so antiseptic. It's empty. Why do you think this is funny? You're going by audience reaction? This is an audience that's raised on television, their standards have been systematically lowered over the years. These guys sit in front of their sets and the gamma rays eat the white cells of their brains out!

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Party Guest: I finally had an orgasm, and my doctor said it was the wrong kind.
Isaac Davis: You had the wrong kind? I've never had the wrong kind, ever. My worst one was right on the money.

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Isaac Davis: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Y'know, I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.
Party Guest: There is this devastating satirical piece on that on the Op Ed page of the Times, it is devastating.
Isaac Davis: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.

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[On her ex-husband]
Mary Wilke: I was tired of submerging my identity to a very brilliant, dominating man. He's a genius.
Isaac Davis: Oh really, he was a genius, Helen's a genius and Dennis is a genius. You know a lot of geniuses, y'know. You should meet some stupid people once in a while, y'know, you could learn something.

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Isaac Davis: It's an interesting group of people, your friends are.
Mary Wilke: I know.
Isaac Davis: Like the cast of a Fellini movie.

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Mary Wilke: I'm honest, whaddya want? I say what's on my mind and, if you can't take it, well then fuck off!
Isaac Davis: And I like the way you express yourself too, y'know, it's pithy yet degenerate. You get many dates?

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Mary Wilke: Well tell me, why did you get a divorce?
Isaac Davis: Why? I got a divorce because my ex-wife left me for another woman.
Mary Wilke: Really? God, that must have been really demoralizing.
Isaac Davis: Well, I dunno, I thought I took it rather well under the circumstances. I tried to run them both over with a car.

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Isaac Davis: I got a kid, he's being raised by two women at the moment.
Mary Wilke: Oh, y'know, I mean I think that works. Uh, they made some studies, I read in one of the psychoanalytic quarterlies. You don't need a male, I mean. Two mothers are absolutely fine.
Isaac Davis: Really? Because I always feel very few people survive one mother.

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Pizzeria Waiter: Who ordered the green peppers? Was that you? Must've been. Anchovies, sausage, mushrooms, garlic and green peppers.
Isaac Davis: Forgot the coconut.

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Isaac Davis: No, I didn't read the piece on China's faceless masses, I was, I was checking out the lingerie ads.

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Mary Wilke: I guess I should straighten my life out, huh? I mean, Donnie my analyst is always telling me...
Isaac Davis: You call your analyst Donnie?
Mary Wilke: Yeah, I call him Donnie.
Isaac Davis: Donnie, your analyst? I call mine Dr. Chomsky, y'know, he hits me with a ruler.

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Isaac Davis: It's brown water! I'm paying seven-hundred dollars a month, I got rats with bongos and a, and a frog and I got brown water here.

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Yale: You know we have to stop seeing each other, don't you.
Mary Wilke: Oh, yeah. Right. Right. I understand. I could tell by the sound of your voice on the phone. Very authoritative, y'know. Like the pope, or the computer in 2001.

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Isaac Davis: You know what you are? You're God's answer to Job, y'know? You would have ended all argument between them. I mean, He would have pointed to you and said, y'know, "I do a lot of terrible things, but I can still make one of these." You know? And then Job would have said, "Eh. Yeah, well, you win."

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Tracy: Let's fool around, it'll take your mind off it.
Isaac Davis: Hey, how many times a night can you, how, how often can you make love in an evening?
Tracy: Well, a lot.
Isaac Davis: Yeah! I can tell, a lot. That's, well, a lot is my favorite number.

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Mary Wilke: Don't psychoanalyze me. I pay a doctor for that.
Isaac Davis: Hey, you call that guy that you talk to a doctor? I mean, you don't get suspicious when your analyst calls you at home at three in the morning and weeps into the telephone?
Mary Wilke: All right, so he's unorthodox. He's a highly qualified doctor.
Isaac Davis: He's done a great job on you, y'know. Your self esteem is like a notch below Kafka's.

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Isaac Davis: I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion.

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Isaac Davis: I think that, under my personal vibrations, I could put her life in some kind of good order.
Yale: Yeah, that's what you said about Jill, and under your personal vibrations she went from bisexuality to homosexuality.
Isaac Davis: Yeah, but I gave her the old college try.

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Isaac Davis: You honestly think that I tried to run you over?
Connie: You just happened to hit the gas as I walked in front of the car?
Isaac Davis: Did I do it on purpose?
Jill: Well, what would Freud say?
Isaac Davis: Freud would say I really wanted to run her over, that's why he was a genius.

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Isaac Davis: So what does, what does your analyst say? I mean, did you speak to him?
Mary Wilke: Well, Donnie's in a coma, he had a very bad acid experience.

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Isaac Davis: What are you telling me, that you're, you're, you're gonna leave Emily, is this true? And, and run away with the, the, the winner of the Zelda Fitzgerald emotional maturity award?

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Tracy: I'll be back in six months.
Isaac Davis: Six months are you kidding? Six months you're gonna go for?
Tracy: We've gone this long, well what's six months if we still love each other?
Isaac Davis: Hey don't be so mature okay? Six months is a long time! Six months, you know you're going to be in working in a theater there, you'll be working with actors and directors, you'll go to rehearsal, you'll hang out with those people, you'll have lunch a lot, before you know it attatchments form you know. You don't want to get into that- you'll change you know you'll be in - in six months you'll be a completely different person.
Tracy: Well don't you want me to have that experience? I mean a while ago you made such a convincing case.
Isaac Davis: Well yeah of course I do but you know, I- I just don't want that thing I like about you to change.
Tracy: I've got to make a plane.
Isaac Davis: C'mon you dont-, c'mon you don't have to go.
Tracy: Why couldn't you have brought this up last week!... Six months isn't so long... not everyone gets corrupted... you have to have a little faith in people.

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Isaac Davis: Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh... Like what... okay... um... For me, uh... ooh... I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh... um... and Wilie Mays... and um... the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues... um... Swedish movies, naturally... Sentimental Education by Flaubert... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... um... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne... uh... the crabs at Sam Wo's... uh... Tracy's face...

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Isaac Davis: I give the whole thing... four weeks. That's it.
Mary Wilke: I, I can't plan that far in advance.
Isaac Davis: You can't plan four weeks in advance?
Mary Wilke: No!
Isaac Davis: What kind of foresight is that?

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Isaac Davis: They probably sit around on the floor with wine and cheese, and mispronounce allegorical and didacticism.

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Yale: It's just gossip, you know. Gossip is the new pornography.

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Isaac Davis: Plus I'll probably have to give my parents less money. It'll kill my father. He's not gonna be able to get as good a seat in the synagogue. He'll be in the back, away from God, far from the action.

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Willie Davis: Why can't we have frankfurters?
Isaac Davis: Because this is a Russian tearoom.

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Isaac Davis: My analyst warned me, but you were so beautiful I got another analyst.

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Isaac Davis: [after reading his ex-wife's book about their relationship]
[to his ex-wife]
Isaac Davis: I came here to strangle you!

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Isaac Davis: I can't express anger. That's one of the problems I have. I grow a tumor instead.

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Isaac Davis: Years ago I wrote this short story about my Mother called "The Castrating Zionist"

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Isaac Davis: When it comes to relationships with women, I'm the winner of the August Strindberg Award.

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