Nora Ephron Quotations

The desire to get married, which - I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women - is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal urge - which is to be single again.

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.

Beware of men who cry. It's true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.

When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh.

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.

Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial.

In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven't.

When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.

As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.

My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.

What will happen to sex after liberation? Frankly, I don't know. It is a great mystery to all of us.

Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.

Joan is very funny. I'm always telling her she's a fraud: Everyone thinks she's fragile and humorless, when we all know she's wildly funny and the last surviving member of the Donner party.

I think what's unexpected is that you keep reading it will happen and hearing it will happen, and then when it happens you find yourself genuinely thrilled on behalf of women.

Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know - it's everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.

It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, ''They lived happily ever after'' and the following quarter-century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know it just might work.

It seemed to me that the desire to get married - which, I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women - is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal urge - which is to be single again

If pregnancy were a book they would cut out the last two chapters

The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.

Working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallflower at an orgy.

You're born, you die. Everything in between is subject to interpretation.

Look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, and nun.

[On George W. Bush:] How is it possible that the president is off on vacation and the vice president is, too? Not that it matters that much if the president is on vacation; on some level, the president is always on vacation.

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.

No one is more romantic than a cynic. I do think that you don't become cynical or 'unsentimental' unless there's a core of romanticism or sentiment that's had a few chips nicked into it.

Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead.

Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from.

What failure ofimagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possiblities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?

Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

I am a writer and a feminist, and the two seem to be constantly in conflict.... ever since I became loosely involved with it, it has seemed to me one of the recurring ironies of this movement that there is no way to tell the truth about it without, in some small way, seeming to hurt it.

When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that's happened ... without wondering what was really going on.

People have only one way to be.

Whenever someone says the words 'Our friendship is more important than this,' watch out, because it almost never is.

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.

The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.

One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older. I am, in fact, at this very moment gaining my looks.

A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it...

I always say that a successful parent is one who raises a child so that they can pay for their own psychoanalysis.

Verbal ability is a highly overrated thing in a guy, and it's our pathetic need for it that gets us into so much trouble.

in a socialist country you can get rich by providing necessities, while in a capitalist country you can get rich by providing luxuries.

American society has a remarkable ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away.

people in New Orleans really care about food, care about it passionately, can spend hours arguing over whether Antoine's is better than Galatoire's or the other way around ... in New Orleans, there is basically nothing to do but eat and then argue about it.

Success comes and goes. Your flops stay with you for life.

[Wellesley College] is about as meaningful to the educational process in America as a perfume factory is to the national economy.

Washington is a city of locker-room boys, and all the old, outmoded notions apply: men and women are ushered to separate rooms after dinner, sex is dirty, and they are still serving onion-soup dip.

The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibility--and, as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is sayingit is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.

Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void. - You've Got Mail

I live in New York City. I could never live anywhere else. The events of September 11 forced me to confront the fact that no matter what, I live here and always will. One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.

I look as young as a person can look given how old I am.

From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters. The beginning is glorious, especially if you're lucky enough not to have morning sickness and if, like me, you've had small breasts all your life. Suddenly they begin to grow, and you've got them, you've really got them, breasts, darling breasts, and when you walk down the street they bounce, truly they do, they bounce bounce bounce.

If your husband is cheating on you with a carhop, get Meryl Streep to play you. You'll feel much better.

Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn't cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldn't cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it's Rachel Samstat, she's bright, she's funny and she can cook!

It was personal to me." ~Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) in You've Got Mail

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.

[I] had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now, I cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don't bump into vinaigrettes that good.)

I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don't. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I'm not.

When you're attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match. - Sleepless in Seattle

... the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read; but it doesn't happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I am truly beside myself.

A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.

... when I finish reading People, I always feel that I have just spent four days in Los Angeles. Women's Wear Daily at least makes me feel dirty; People makes me feel that I haven't read or learned or seen anything at all.

Take notes. Everything is copy.

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).

Everybody dies. There's nothing you can do about it. Whether you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.

I actually believe in denial.

There are plenty of men who philander during the summer, to be sure, but they are usually the same lot who philander during the winter - albeit with less convenience.

In the way that women forget the pain of childbirth, men forget that they cry in movies.

Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up.

Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to a shortage of men, but otherwise not worth the trouble.

I am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity [Wellesley] stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word. How marvelous it would have been to go to a women's college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument.

I was just taking her hand to help her out of a cab. And it was like... magic.

The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.

That's another thing about being a certain age that I've noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror.

You can never have too much butter – that is my belief. If I have a religion, that's it,

You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).

Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won't have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don't mean to be too literal about this.

It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.

The odd thing about this form of communication is you're more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many... somethings. So, thanks.

It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?

I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can’t believe I’m here without her.”- on losing her best friend

I'll have what she's having

Well, I'm gonna get out of bed every morning... breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out... and, then after a while, I won't have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while. - Sleepless in Seattle

The empty nest is underrated.

Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together... and I knew it. I knew it the very first time I touched her. It was like coming home... only to no home I'd ever known... I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like... magic. - Sleepless in Seattle

We have a game we play when we’re waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was [in my twenties], I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy.

Believe me, if I looked good, it's not an accident.

Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. (Although there’s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there’s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)

Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it.

That's your problem! You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.

The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you're not involved in any more because you've already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news - did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it? - has a kind of fun appeal.

Why do people write books that say it's better to be older than to be younger? It's not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you're constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday ... If you work, you're surrounded by young people who are plugged into the marketplace, the demographic, the zeitgeist; they want your job and someday they're going to get it.

I know that I am essentially a sort of fun-loving person who really just wants to sit around and eat pies.