"The heart wants what it wants. There's no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that's that" — when addressing public scrutiny over his relationship with his Soon-Yi Previn
The filmmaker Woody Allen describes himself as enormously pessimistic about the human condition. "I have a very grim, pessimistic view of it. I always have since I was a little boy; it hasn’t gotten worse with age or anything. I do feel that’s it’s a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself," says he. He famously joked that life is split into the horrible (severe tragedies) and the miserable, making you lucky if you're only miserable (quite ironic that the site I took this quote from is named "Inspirational Quotes").
He defines himself as "alarmist" who leaps from minor physical quirks to terminal diagnoses, crediting this trait to his fear of death. A journalist described his voice as the only one he'd ever heard that could twinkle with despair, which is quite socionically telling. Ni, in its program, irrational form is the most pessimistic function of all, and him still managing to "twinkle" is telling both for emotional suggestion and for a certain degree of "emotivist" flexibility. The negativism suggests ILI, and he does have an accent on this type, but his filmography — Purple Rose, Radio Days, Midnight in Paris (a man travels to the twenties and finds the people there pining for the 1890s, while in the 1890s they wish they lived in the Renaissance), the Gershwin, the black-and-white Manhattan — is in gentle nostalgia and romantic wish. That the lyrical imagery of IEI, not of ILI ironic Swiftian skeptic.
His filmography is quite vast, but he never described himself as a workaholic — he claimed that he could produce a masterpiece if he had been less lazy and more hard-working. After all, Sergei Yesenin (Aushra's nickname for the type, an extraverted IEI) wrote quite a lot of poems, and he'd definitely reject the workaholic epithet for himself, too. For this type the artistic output (and it's definitely artistic) is a byproduct of continuously-running imaginative faculty running continuously, not of effort as such. Unlike your typical EII he clearly does not experience himself as responsible for other people, making no effort to govern his own desires, and the whole shape of his personal history follows from that.
The lack of personal responsiblity is also a somewhat weaker point against WSS typing of him as LII, a typing that doesn't fit in general. Allen likes to refer to Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, etc. but the main mode of engagement with them is aesthetic absorption rather than analysis. At best, the intellectualism slightly increases the ILI accent. And of course, LII is quite average as far as being obsessed with own mortality is concerned, while IEI and ILI score high. He has no interest in building a global system of laws (yes, despite being attentive to gray areas and doubt, LII tends to be "gnostic," while ILI is "agnostic" in this sense), in formal logic except as a joke about people who have it. Even the artistic neuroticism is more IEI material — LII can be higher than average in neurotic traits, but rarely advertises them in its work. On a side note, World Socionics Society — LII, Talanov — IEI is a somewhat common pattern, which is intriguing and point out to how the two schools divide the psychological space slightly differently.
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