Nora Ephron famous quotes

New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.)
-- Nora Ephron

#Self #Cities #Two

Food is one of my favourite things. Though I certainly know lots of people who happen to be happily married who don't have food play the role in it that it plays in my life. And I don't know how they do it, and frankly I feel so bad for them because I just love food and one of my favourite things is asking, "What do we want for dinner? What do we feel like eating?" That wonderful negotiation that goes on several times a week about what "we" feel like.
-- Nora Ephron

#Play #People #Roles

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
-- Nora Ephron

#Life #Inspiring #Encouraging

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

#Mean #People #Denial

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.
-- Nora Ephron

#Inspirational #Graduation #Women

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

#Thinking #Numbers #Wrinkles

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.
-- Nora Ephron

#Love #Marriage #Want

You don't really have to believe what you write in a blog for more than the moment when you're writing it. You don't bring the same solemnity that you would bring to an actual essay.
-- Nora Ephron

#Believe #Writing #Moments

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

#Regret #Reading #Years

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

#Mistake #Skills #People

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

#Dog #Children #Teenager

When I was young, I had a list of things that I wanted in a husband. I knew what he should read and what sports he should like and blah, blah, blah. But the truth is, that the list was a shocking mirror image of me. You want to marry yourself when you are young. All the things you think are so urgently important, when you get older, you discover they don't have anything to do with love.
-- Nora Ephron

#Sports #Husband #Thinking

I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.
-- Nora Ephron

#Thinking #Next #All Time

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

#Falling In Love #Fall #Experts

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

#New York #Heart #Light

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

#Fighting #Want #Lasts

Maybe young women don't wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands.
-- Nora Ephron

#Husband #Women #Thinking

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

#Running #People #Infinite

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. 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, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
-- Nora Ephron

#Real #Book #Reading

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

#Thinking #Voice #Matter

…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

#Thinking #Hair #Worry

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

#Littles #Scripts #Closets

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

#Women #Firsts #Pioneers

So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained, not just in society but in literature. The women's movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don't know whether it can ever clean up the mess in our minds.
-- Nora Ephron

#Men #Mind #Literature

You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be.
-- Nora Ephron

#Thinking #People #Parent

Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it's your last, or do you save your money on the chance you'll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in American is so unbelievable delicious? And what about chocolate?
-- Nora Ephron

#Years #Smell #Long

I definitely divide my life into decades. Almost every ten years, something in my work life has changed. My twenties were my journalistic phase, then there was my screenwriting phase, then I became a director, then I started doing some plays...
-- Nora Ephron

#Years #Play #Phases

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.
-- Nora Ephron

#People #Laughing #Bananas

Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? and I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! I mean, it's not as if I wasn't a writer. It's not as if I hadn't often written about myself. I'd even written about him. What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life? " 
-- Nora Ephron

#Book #Writing #Mean

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing! It's a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.
-- Nora Ephron

#Food #Long #Cooking

Vera said: “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?” So I told her why. Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.
-- Nora Ephron

#Hurt #Sorry #Laughing

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

#Laughing #People #Movement

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

#Knowing #Uterus #Looks

Most of us live our lives devoid of cinematic moments.
-- Nora Ephron

#Moments

Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.
-- Nora Ephron

#Divorce #Forever #Comes And Goes

You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So 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

#Thinking #Knowing #Sick

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

#Strong #Two #People

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

#Uplifting #Hair #Dry

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

#Cute #Sex #Mind

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

#Knowing #Deals #Believer

And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands.
-- Nora Ephron

#Husband #Careers #Mind

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.
-- Nora Ephron

#Movie #Weekend #Optimism

The hardest thing about writing is writing.
-- Nora Ephron

#Writing #Hardest

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

#Children #Important #Entering

You can't call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in the right to abortion.
-- Nora Ephron

#Believe #Feminist #Abortion

I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.
-- Nora Ephron

#Love #Regret #Mistake

When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first, that way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.
-- Nora Ephron

#Book #Dark #Pages

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

#Men #Feelings #Tears

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

#Inspirational #Baby #Pregnancy

And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.
-- Nora Ephron

#Dream #Reality #Choices

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

#Summer #Breeze #Bachelors

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.
-- Nora Ephron

#Writing #Acceptance #Care

The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women.
-- Nora Ephron

#Hurt #Steps #Steps Forward

There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.
-- Nora Ephron

#Ocean #Book #Oxygen

You can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.
-- Nora Ephron

#Dream #Reality #Fool

In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50-years-old.
-- Nora Ephron

#Clueless #Years #Facts

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

#Baby #Dust #Different

There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.
-- Nora Ephron

#Exercise #Hair #Feminism

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.
-- Nora Ephron

#Mother #Cooking #Culinary

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.
-- Nora Ephron

#Love #Marriage #Pet

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

#Depression #Crazy #People

And so, Thanksgiving. Its the most amazing holiday. Just think about it — it's a miracle that once a year so many millions of Americans sit down to exactly the same meal as one another, exactly the same meal they grew up eating, and exactly the same meal they ate a year earlier. The turkey. The sweet potatoes. The stuffing. The pumpkin pie. Is there anything else we all can agree so vehemently about? I don't think so.
-- Nora Ephron

#Sweet #Holiday #Thinking

Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them.
-- Nora Ephron

#Children #Obligation #Understood

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

#Believe #Fighting #Thinking

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

#Divorce #Long #Important

I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.
-- Nora Ephron

#Believe #Passion #Married

I have a theory that children remember two things-when you weren't there and when they threw up.
-- Nora Ephron

#Children #Two #Remember

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

#Writing #Interesting #Trying

So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?
-- Nora Ephron

#Book #Way

Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. ... Reading is bliss.
-- Nora Ephron

#Reading #Bliss #Better Person

Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.
-- Nora Ephron

#New York #Fall #School

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

#Mother #Tragedy #One Day

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

#Intelligent #People #Offensive

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.
-- Nora Ephron

#Father #Believe #Thinking

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.
-- Nora Ephron

#Hurt #Two #Feminist