Top 100 Ephron Quotes
#1. Phoebe Wolkind Ephron cracked wise like Dorothy Parker and looked like Katharine Hepburn.
Hallie Ephron
#2. If there is a Nora Ephron signature anything it is that there's slightly too much food. I have a friend whose mantra is: You must choose. And I believe the exact opposite: I think you should always have at least four desserts that are kind of fighting with each other.
Nora Ephron
#3. It was a long time ago: 'Angela's Ashes' by Frank McCourt. It was a great story that was lasting, and I loved it so much. I also love Nora Ephron. I gobble up everything she writes. Also, I love Anthony Bourdain, very irreverent and funny.
Isabel Gillies
#4. By 1996 Nora Ephron was telling a graduating class at Wellesley, Don't underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. ... Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you.
Rebecca Traister
#5. There are beauty icons that I can never be like, sorta like a Gena Rowlands - I'll never have that look. I love Giulietta Masina, the great Fellini actress. But I'm probably more Seymour Cassel. Or somewhere between Lou Reed and Nora Ephron?
Natasha Lyonne
#6. It was in 'Esquire' in the 1970s that I first learned Nora Ephron's recipe for borscht - certainly an editorial first for that manly magazine.
Carolyn See
#7. I like Nora Ephron. She wasn't a critic in the strictest sense of the word, but she did a lot of social criticism. She was so funny and so in the right place at the right time.
Wesley Morris
#8. I love the Bronte sisters, but I feel a closer kinship to the Ephron sisters, Nora and Delia, if only because their work makes me laugh more than the Brontes. I also love the Mitford sisters with their secret language and their endless letters back and forth.
Kate Klise
#9. From the first instant I met her, I wanted to be Nora Ephron. I just really wanted to please her.
Natasha Lyonne
#10. For every man there was an inferior woman, for every writer there was a checker," said Nora Ephron. "they were the artists and we were the drones.
Lynn Povich
#11. My favorite, and the author I wish I was reading right now and always is Nora Ephron. I love the humor, the awareness, the sense of self-deprecation. She is such a role model to me.
Garance Dore
#12. I was always a huge fan of Nora Ephron.
Haylie Duff
#13. Nora Ephron's great line that overtipping only costs a few dollars more.
John Waters
#15. I know that I am essentially a sort of fun-loving person who really just wants to sit around and eat pies.
Nora Ephron
#16. I hear myself saying these words: What this movement is about is options. I say it to friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I'm really thinking is, If you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.
Nora Ephron
#18. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. I mean we've all read pieces where we thought, 'Oh, who gives a damn.'
Nora Ephron
#19. I must try this again, I thought; I must try again someday to sit still and not say a word. Maybe when I'm dead.
Nora Ephron
#20. Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.
Hallie Ephron
#21. 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
#22. So, twice a week, I go to a beauty salon and have my hair blown dry. It's cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting.
Nora Ephron
#23. In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings.
Delia Ephron
#25. A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it ...
Nora Ephron
#26. The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.
Nora Ephron
#27. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications.
Nora Ephron
#28. You can't meet someone until you become what you're becoming.
Nora Ephron
#29. Plastic surgery is a way for people to buy themselves a few years before they have to truly confront what ageing is, which of course is not that your looks are falling apart, but that you are falling apart and some-day you will have fallen apart and ceased to exist.
Nora Ephron
#31. We weren't meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren't meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions, or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.
Nora Ephron
#32. At the age of 55, you will get a saggy roll just above your waist, even if you are painfully thin.
Nora Ephron
#33. 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
#34. I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.
Nora Ephron
#35. I love it that I'm standing alone, it doesn't bother me, actually I prefer it, actually I don't give a shit. I am a superior being in an alien world. No, in a world of red-faced aliens. That thought tickled her, but only for a minute. Mainly she longed to feel that she wasn't invisible.
Delia Ephron
#36. I use those medical gloves that fit very tightly and are disposable for all chopping - peppers, onions, garlic, etc. Very Lady Macbeth, I think.
Nora Ephron
#37. 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
#38. What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.
Nora Ephron
#39. I mention all this so that you will understand that is part of the process: once you've found out he's cheated on you, you have to keep finding it out, over and over and over again, until you've degraded yourself so completely that there's nothing left to do but walk out.
Nora Ephron
#40. We all look good for our age. Except for our necks.
Nora Ephron
#41. 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.
Nora Ephron
#43. You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.
Nora Ephron
#44. Well, at least this time I get to be a person in the story. The last time you told one of your Russian parables I was a bag of chickens.
Nora Ephron
#45. When something happens far back in the past, people often can't recall exact details. Blame depends upon point of view. There may be a villain, but reality is frustrating because it's often ambiguous.
Hallie Ephron
#46. Craig was a nice guy, don't get me wrong, but he was so low-key that once I'd gotten to know him, I was almost completely unable to have even imaginary conversations with him while cooking his recipes. Around
Nora Ephron
#47. Black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.
Nora Ephron
#48. Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.
Nora Ephron
#49. In life one rarely knows which remarks of the hundreds uttered in the course of a day will turn out to be auspicious. In fiction, foreshadowing is planted and flagged in some (hopefully or desperately) subtle way, drama demands it.
Delia Ephron
#50. When you put your characters in a dire situation, they often do things that surprise even you, so you have to go back and revise your original conception of who they are.
Hallie Ephron
#51. 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.
Nora Ephron
#52. According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at forty-three, and that's that ... The neck is a dead give-away. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn't have to if it had a neck.
Nora Ephron
#53. 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
#54. New Yorkers are born all over the country, and then they come to New York City and it hits them: Oh, that's who I am.
Delia Ephron
#55. Look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, and nun.
Nora Ephron
#56. 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.
Nora Ephron
#57. 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?
Nora Ephron
#58. I feel really bad for people who aren't insane over food.
Nora Ephron
#59. 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
#60. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person ... Reading is bliss.
Nora Ephron
#61. If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
Nora Ephron
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.
Nora Ephron
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.
Nora Ephron
#69. I have one rule I live by: Only do what you can do. That neans you're never looking outside for what's popular; you're always looking inside for what's true.
Delia Ephron
#70. Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.
Nora Ephron
#71. One quarter of what you buy will turn out to be mistakes.
Delia Ephron
#72. 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.
Nora Ephron
#73. It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.
Nora Ephron
#74. If you think about something else hard enough, you can mostly control your feelings.
Delia Ephron
#75. I don't have writer's block, really. I do have times when I can't get the lead, and that is the only part of the story which I have serious trouble with. I don't write a word of the article until I have the lead. It just sets the whole tone - the whole point of view.
Nora Ephron
#76. Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.
Nora Ephron
#77. In your standard-issue family, of which few remain, but on which our expectations are still based, there are parents and there are children. The way you know which are which, aside from certain size and age differences and despite any behavior similarities, is that the parents are the bossy ones.
Delia Ephron
#78. Someone will always tell you what you want to hear.
Delia Ephron
#79. I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out.
Nora Ephron
#80. 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
#81. 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.
Nora Ephron
#83. That's what a marriage is...Pieces break off, and you glue them back on.
Nora Ephron
#84. 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
#85. Your basic extended family today includes your ex-husband or -wife, your ex's new mate, your new mate, possibly your new mate's ex and any new mate that your new mate's ex has acquired.
Delia Ephron
#86. It consists entirely of people who are not related by blood, many of whom can't stand each other.
Delia Ephron
#87. The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first 'adult novel,' Lucy Maud Montgomery's 'The Blue Castle.'
Hallie Ephron
#88. Whenever someone says the words 'Our friendship is more important than this,' watch out, because it almost never is.
Nora Ephron
#89. A man notices a woman's figure when she walks in a room. Women have eight million words for blue; a man says dark blue or light blue.
Hallie Ephron
#90. I'd long wanted to write about that moment when a woman steps off the career track to have her first child. For me, that was a scary time.
Hallie Ephron
#91. Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I accomplished something, became a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on.
Nora Ephron
#92. Writing is how I understand everything that happens. Writing is the only way I know to move on.
Delia Ephron
#93. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it.
Nora Ephron
#94. Let's face it: part of being a grownup is that every day you have to choose between going out at night or staying home, and it is one of life's unhappy truths that there is not enough time to do both.
Nora Ephron
#95. Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them.
Nora Ephron
#96. 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
#97. If you're looking for monogamy, you'd better marry a swan.
Nora Ephron
#98. Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline.
Hallie Ephron
#99. Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
Nora Ephron
#100. Checked out the mirror to see if I looked older, or sadder, or wiser. I didn't; I just looked tired.
Nora Ephron
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