Top 100 Nora Ephron Quotes
#1. If only I had grown up worshipping Julia Child. I was already grown up - thank you very much - when Julia Child's book was published. When I moved to New York in 1962, you had to own it.
Nora Ephron
#2. The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.
Nora Ephron
#3. You can't meet someone until you become what you're becoming.
Nora Ephron
#4. I've just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture: I was reading a book ... I felt alive and engaged and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I've loved.
Nora Ephron
#5. Every 10 years or so, there was a moment when I'd say, even subconsciously, 'Is that all there is?' You've got to find ways to keep it fresh for yourself.
Nora Ephron
#6. We all look good for our age. Except for our necks.
Nora Ephron
#7. When you get divorced and you don't get the house (which I never did), you leave behind all sorts of things you don't have the sense to know you'll someday wonder about, or wish you still had, or, worst of all, feel genuinely nostalgic for.
Nora Ephron
#8. Look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, and nun.
Nora Ephron
#9. I feel really bad for people who aren't insane over food.
Nora Ephron
#10. Your hair doesn't need to be washed every day any more than your black pants have to be dry-cleaned every time you wear them.
Nora Ephron
#11. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person ... Reading is bliss.
Nora Ephron
#12. I think when you get older, things come along that you know are a test in some way of your ability to stay with it. And when e-mail came along, I was just going to fall in love with it. And I did. I can't believe it now - it's like one of those ex-husbands that you think, 'What was I thinking?'
Nora Ephron
#13. Consciousness-raising is at the very least supposed to bring about an intimacy, but what it seems instead to bring about are the trappings of intimacy, the illusion of intimacy, a semblance of intimacy.
Nora Ephron
#14. 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.
Nora Ephron
#15. I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.
[Interview clip in the In Memoriam section of the 85th Academy Awards ceremony, Feb. 24, 2013]
Nora Ephron
#17. It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.
Nora Ephron
#18. To state the obvious, romantic comedies have to be funny and they have to be romantic. But one of the most important things, for me anyway, is that they be about two strong people finding their way to love.
Nora Ephron
#19. I am not a new journalist, whatever that is. I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.
Nora Ephron
#20. Whenever someone says the words 'Our friendship is more important than this,' watch out, because it almost never is.
Nora Ephron
#21. Plastic surgery is one of the ways that people deal with the aging process. And I don't mean by using it as a form of denial, but as a kind of negotiation with it.
Nora Ephron
#22. If you're looking for monogamy, you'd better marry a swan.
Nora Ephron
#23. Checked out the mirror to see if I looked older, or sadder, or wiser. I didn't; I just looked tired.
Nora Ephron
#24. The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.
Enough about that.The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me.And now it's not.
Nora Ephron
#26. 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.
Nora Ephron
#27. I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
Nora Ephron
#28. One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there's no confusion about who's to blame: you are.
Nora Ephron
#29. Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial.
Nora Ephron
#30. E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.
Nora Ephron
#31. 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
Nora Ephron
#32. Every so often I contemplate suicide merely to remind myself of my complete lack of interest in it as a solution to anything at all.
Nora Ephron
#33. I don't know why so much nonsense about age is written - although I can certainly understand that no one really wants to read anything that says aging sucks.
Nora Ephron
#34. Everybody I know who goes out and plays a little softball, they break their leg.
Nora Ephron
#35. Journalists are interesting. They just aren't as interesting as the things they cover.
Nora Ephron
#36. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead.
Nora Ephron
#37. I was a journalist and I liked to watch. I was in awe.
Nora Ephron
#38. 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.
Nora Ephron
#39. 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.
Nora Ephron
#40. Having been married so many times, I know that one of the few things I am an expert in is falling in love.
Nora Ephron
#41. What happens to me when I'm provoked is that I get tongue-tied and my mind goes blank. Then I spend all night tossing and turning trying to figure out what I should have said
Nora Ephron
#42. I've always felt that one of the mistakes people make is that they try to do something that is just slightly beyond their skill set, and then feel they've failed.
Nora Ephron
#43. I was always proud of being tough-minded, and I think I still am, but in my old age I've got a little softer in the head, and that's all right.
Nora Ephron
#44. Above all, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.
Nora Ephron
#45. My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.
Nora Ephron
#46. In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50-years-old.
Nora Ephron
#47. I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be - feminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half bad at being a woman.
Nora Ephron
#48. Here's the thing about dessert--you want it to last. You want to savor it.
Nora Ephron
#49. When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.
Nora Ephron
#50. It's always a shock to the people who run studios when a movie that is for women is a hit. They have an infinite capacity to be shocked.
Nora Ephron
#51. Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
Nora Ephron
#52. I discovered then that the world I was living in was so much more interesting than the world I was capable of conceiving.
Nora Ephron
#53. These days most women have jobs that last way too long. A lot of people in New York barely have time to get laid.
Nora Ephron
#54. I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.
Nora Ephron
#55. ... the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.
Nora Ephron
#56. New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.)
Nora Ephron
#57. I cannot understand any woman's wanting to be the first woman to do anything ... It is a devastating burden and I could not take it, could not be a pioneer, a Symbol of Something Greater.
Nora Ephron
#58. I just want to go on making movies, and some of them will be completely meaningless, except, of course, to me.
Nora Ephron
#59. He was, in his way, as close to a Zen master as I've ever had, and all of us who fell under his influence began with his style and eventually ended up with our own.
Nora Ephron
#60. As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.
Nora Ephron
#61. Too few journalists become screenwriters. I say to all the would-be screenwriters: Become journalists. And I'll say to working journalists: Do not stay journalists. Become screenwriters.
Nora Ephron
#62. You'd be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins.
Nora Ephron
#63. You can't call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in the right to abortion.
Nora Ephron
#64. Vera looked at me, and her eyes filled with tears. She does this sometimes, especially when I'm being hateful and difficult; she responds by having all the feelings I'm refusing to have. Now she reached over and took my hand, and we both began to cry.
Nora Ephron
#65. 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.
Nora Ephron
#66. The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.
Nora Ephron
#67. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in it.
Nora Ephron
#68. Working as a journalist is exactly like being the wallflower at an orgy. I always seem to find myself at a perfectly wonderful event where everyone else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes on it all.
Nora Ephron
#69. Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from.
Nora Ephron
#70. Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying.
Nora Ephron
#71. All I do when I write scripts is think about food: 'Have I worked long enough to justify a walk to the kitchen?'
Nora Ephron
#72. There is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.
Nora Ephron
#73. We have lived through the era when happiness was a warm puppy, and the era when happiness was a dry martini, and now we have come to the era when happiness is 'knowing what your uterus looks like'.
Nora Ephron
#74. In a socialist country you can get rich by providing necessities, while in a capitalist country you can get rich by providing luxuries.
Nora Ephron
#75. Whatever it is, I'm not up for it." "Oh, Missee Felman, I feel so bad for ju,
Nora Ephron
#76. I was just taking her hand to help her out of a cab. And it was like ... magic.
Nora Ephron
#77. What did she look like?" "Thin. Pretty. Big tits. Your basic nightmare." We
Nora Ephron
#79. I'm not one of those people who think you should go grey and that there is some virtue in looking wrinkly if you don't feel like it. If you do, great. If you don't, just my only caution is watch out. There are a huge number of wrinkle creams that do nothing for you.
Nora Ephron
#80. People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate.
Nora Ephron
#81. My closet is full of sad little scripts that didn't get made that have sad endings. It's very hard to get a movie made that has a sad ending.
Nora Ephron
#82. I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.
Nora Ephron
#83. The best divorce is the kind where there are no children. That was my first divorce. You walk out the door and you never look back.
Nora Ephron
#84. The neck starts to go at 43, and that's that.
Nora Ephron
#85. If Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue he would never have wondered what women want.
Nora Ephron
#87. Everybody dies. There's no avoiding it, and I do not believe for one second that butter is the cause of anyone's death. Overeating may be, but not butter, please. I just feel bad for people who make that mistake.
Nora Ephron
#88. Success comes and goes. Your flops stay with you for life.
Nora Ephron
#89. That's your problem! You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.
Nora Ephron
#90. I'm religious about salted butter. I don't understand how it happened that everyone thought we should all have sweet butter. I blame the French.
Nora Ephron
#91. But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude: 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'm truly beside myself.
Nora Ephron
#92. I think if you're lucky enough to find a voice in whatever you do, that voice will come sneaking out no matter what.
Nora Ephron
#93. I think you often have that sense when you write
that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.
Nora Ephron
#94. I'm a good cook, and I look at something like 'Iron Chef' and think, 'It's a good thing I already know how to cook' - because I would never think I could do it if I watched these shows.
Nora Ephron
#95. It's so interesting that we think we know the rules to this game, this total hypothetical game called, "Would you," "If you had it to do over." It's not out there.
Nora Ephron
#96. Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four.
Nora Ephron
#97. 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.
Nora Ephron
#98. Believe me, if I looked good, it's not an accident.
Nora Ephron
#99. You're born, you die. Everything in between is subject to interpretation.
Nora Ephron
#100. No man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her. Sex is always out there. Friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Nora Ephron
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
