Top 100 Ephron's Quotes
#1. Nora Ephron's great line that overtipping only costs a few dollars more.
John Waters
#2. 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
#3. The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.
Nora Ephron
#4. 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
#5. 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. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.
Nora Ephron
#6. Writing is what I do. It's like breathing to me at a certain point, but if I couldn't write, I do like cooking.
Nora Ephron
#7. 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
#8. Of course, everyone has something wrong with him, that's for sure, but this guy probably had something really wrong. Perhaps
Nora Ephron
#9. As complicated as joint custody is, it allows the delicious contradiction of having children and maintaining the intimacy of life-before-kid s.
Delia Ephron
#10. When you're young, you think that clothes are almost magical, and that if you wear the right thing - to school, to the prom, on the date, etc. - something's going to happen. Black, it's the anti-magical thing. It comes from the recognition that it is not going to be 'the' dress.
Nora Ephron
#11. I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are?'
Nora Ephron
#12. One of the great things about movies is that it's just that short period of time. It's a bubble. The last thing you want to know is that Elizabeth and Darcy had a fight over how to treat the servants!
Nora Ephron
#13. My parents were screenwriters, and they had four daughters and we all write. So that's amazing. Talk about powerful parents. My mother always said to us, "Everything is copy."
Nora Ephron
#14. I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about - and I think there are some writers who do that - but that hasn't happened to me. I do think it's dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error.
Nora Ephron
#15. 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
#16. Here's the thing about dessert--you want it to last. You want to savor it.
Nora Ephron
#17. 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.
Nora Ephron
#18. 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.
Nora Ephron
#19. Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from failure is that it's entirely possible you will have another failure.
Nora Ephron
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. I was alive during the women's lib movement, and I do not remember anyone taking a position against cooking. I think they were talking about other things.
Nora Ephron
#23. Again from a distance, Sukie was once again struck by her mother's chic and how different things can seem from far away, how there's more than one truth, the faraway truth and the truth close up.
Delia Ephron
#24. I just bring a black turtleneck sweater everywhere - it's the greatest purchase of my life. Period.
Nora Ephron
#25. I have now been married to my third husband for more than 20 years. But when you've had children with someone you're divorced from, divorce defines everything; it's the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.
Nora Ephron
#26. 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
#27. I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.
Nora Ephron
#28. A man doesn't recognize his own wife. Because she's happy.
Delia Ephron
#29. Believe me, if I looked good, it's not an accident.
Nora Ephron
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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.
Nora Ephron
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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.
Nora Ephron
#36. Directing movies is the best job there is, that's all. I can hardly say a word after that. It's just a great job.
Nora Ephron
#37. That's your problem! You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.
Nora Ephron
#38. 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
#39. The neck starts to go at 43, and that's that.
Nora Ephron
#40. When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.
Nora Ephron
#41. 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
#42. Am I being too critical? That's what happens when you feel shitty about yourself. You turn into a bitch.
Delia Ephron
#43. That [photographs] disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that's why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.
Nora Ephron
#44. He loved Thelma, Jonathan said, he had never loved anyone but Thelma, he had loved Thelma for nineteen years and would always love her even though Thelma didn't give a rat's ass about him and never had.
Nora Ephron
#45. One good thing I'd like to say about divorce is that it sometimes makes it possible for you to be a much better wife to your next husband because you have a place for your anger - it's not directed at the person you're currently with.
Nora Ephron
#46. I recognize that printing pictures of corpses raises all sorts of problems about taste and titillation and sensationalism; the fact is, however, that people die. Death happens to be one of life's main events. And it is irresponsible and more than that, inaccurate, for newspapers to fail to show it.
Nora Ephron
#47. 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?
Nora Ephron
#48. If you are a stepparent, rush right out and get yourself a dog. Because it's very nice to have someone in the house that loves you.
Delia Ephron
#49. Eat every meal as if it's your last; when the last one comes, you probably won't be very hungry.
Nora Ephron
#50. Children are a house's enemy. They don't mean to be - they just can't help it. It's their enthusiasm, their energy, their naturally destructive tendencies.
Delia Ephron
#51. 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.
Nora Ephron
#52. The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.
Nora Ephron
#53. What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.
Nora Ephron
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. At the age of 55, you will get a saggy roll just above your waist, even if you are painfully thin.
Nora Ephron
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. You can't meet someone until you become what you're becoming.
Nora Ephron
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it ...
Nora Ephron
#68. In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings.
Delia Ephron
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#75. 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
#76. I know that I am essentially a sort of fun-loving person who really just wants to sit around and eat pies.
Nora Ephron
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. That's what a marriage is...Pieces break off, and you glue them back on.
Nora Ephron
#83. 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
#84. It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.
Nora Ephron
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.
Nora Ephron
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Phoebe Wolkind Ephron cracked wise like Dorothy Parker and looked like Katharine Hepburn.
Hallie Ephron
#97. You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.
Nora Ephron
#99. 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
#100. We all look good for our age. Except for our necks.
Nora Ephron
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