Nora Ephron Quotes & Sayings

I am the kind of person who really will drive hours for a bowl of chili. I'm not a three-star restaurant kind of a person; I'm just a food person. — Nora Ephron

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

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

We're saved somewhat by Google. You can - when you're all sitting around the table desperately snapping your fingers in the hopes of remembering the name of that movie that you can't remember the name of - you can make people think that you are not as old as you actually are because you have the technology to find the answer. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

She's talking about condominiums," my friend Betty Searle called up to say one day. "Obviously she's involved with someone."
Are you sure?" I said.
Of course I'm sure," said Betty. "The question is who." She thought for a minute. "Maybe it's Senator Campbell," she said. "He's talking condominiums, too."
Senators always talk about condominiums," I said.
That's true," said Betty. — Nora Ephron

The one thing I would like to get across about my whole feeling regarding high school is how I was when I was fifteen. Gawky. Always a hem hanging down, or strap loose, or a pimple on my chin. I never knew what to do with my hair. I was a mess. And I still carry that fifteen-year-old girl around now. A piece of me still believes I'm the girl nobody dances with. — Nora Ephron

The empty nest is underrated. — Nora Ephron

I grew up with fantastic Southern food. In Southern California. — Nora Ephron

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

You get to be a certain age and you start reading stuff about the age you are, and you think, what is wrong with these people who are writing these books? Do they not have necks? — Nora Ephron

The next man I was involved with lived in Boston. He taught me to cook mushrooms. He taught me that if you heat the butter very hot and put just a very few mushrooms into the frying pan, they come out nice and brown and crispy, whereas if the butter is only moderately hot and you crowd the mushrooms, they get all mushy and wet. Every time I make mushrooms I think of him. There was another man in my life when I was younger who taught me to put sour cream into scrambled eggs, and since I never ever put sour cream into scrambled eggs I never really think of him at all. — Nora Ephron

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

I've always believed that the concept of the Jewish princess was invented by a Jewish prince who couldn't get his wife to fetch him the butter. I was not raised as — Nora Ephron

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

I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don't do anything. I just sort of have lunch - all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece. — Nora Ephron

If I was home alone at night, I cooked myself an entire meal from one of these cookbooks. Then I sat down in front of the television set and ate it. I felt very brave and plucky as I ate my perfect dinner. Okay, I didn't have a date, but at least I wasn't one of those lonely women who sat home with a pathetic container of yogurt. — Nora Ephron

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

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

Meanwhile, every so often, your children come to visit. They are, amazingly, completely charming people. You can't believe you're lucky enough to know them. They make you laugh. They make you proud. You love them madly. They survived you. You survived them. It crosses your mind that on some level, you spent hours and days and months and years without laying a glove on them, but don't dwell. There's no point. It's over. Except for the worrying. The worrying is forever. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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. — Nora Ephron

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

You can blame Al Gore and you can blame Ralph Nader and you can blame George Bush, but I blame Bill [Clinton]. I just do. I just think he squandered his presidency the night that woman delivered that pizza to him, and if he hadn't, we wouldn't be where we are and there would be a lot of people who are alive today who aren't. — Nora Ephron

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

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

Just before I'd moved to New York, two historic events had occurred: The birth control pill had been invented, and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was over, you cooked something. — Nora Ephron

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

On some level, my life has been wasted on me. After all, if I can't remember it, who can? — Nora Ephron

I think I was so entranced with being a couple that I didn't even notice that the person I thought I was a couple with thought he was a couple with someone else. — Nora Ephron

I was a journalist and I liked to watch. I was in awe. — Nora Ephron

The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino. - Joe Fox — Nora Ephron

Whatever it is, I'm not up for it." "Oh, Missee Felman, I feel so bad for ju, — Nora Ephron

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

I just bring a black turtleneck sweater everywhere - it's the greatest purchase of my life. Period. — Nora Ephron

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

SALLY Harry, I can't do this anymore. I am not your consolation prize. Goodbye. — Nora Ephron

There were cats; cats I was wildly attached to - my husband and I spoke in cat voices. Once the marriage was over, I never thought of the cats again (until I wrote about them in a novel and disguised them as hamsters). — Nora Ephron

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

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

Nothing like mashed potatoes when you're feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin, cold slice of butter to every forkful. — Nora Ephron

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

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

I had no idea the Monkey Bar meat loaf was going to have my name on it, but when the restaurant opened, there it was, on the menu, Nora's Meat Loaf. I felt that I had to order it, out of loyalty to myself, and it was exactly as good as it had been at the tasting. I was delighted. What's more, I had the oddest sense of accomplishment. I somehow felt I'd created this meat loaf, even though I'd had nothing to do with it. I'd always envied Nellie Melba for her peach, Princess Margherita for her pizza, and Reuben for his sandwich, and now I was sort of one of them. Nora's Meat Loaf. It was something to remember me by. It wasn't exactly what I was thinking of back in the day when we used to play a game called "If you could have something named after you, what would it be?" In that period, I'd hoped for a dance step, or a pair of pants. But I was older now, and I was willing to settle for a meat loaf. — Nora Ephron

HARRY: (Voice-over)The first time we met we hated each other.
SALLY:
(Voice-over) You didn't hate me, I hated you. (beat) And the second time we met, you didn't even remember me.
HARRY (Voice-over) I did too, I remembered you. (a long beat) The third time we met, we became friends.
SALLY:(Voice-over) We were friends for a long time.
HARRY:(Voice-over) And then we weren't.
SALLY: (Voice-over) And then we fell in love.
SALLY Three months later we got married.
HARRY It only took three months.
SALLY Twelve years and three months. — Nora Ephron

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

But it doesn't begin to convey how stressful and time-consuming an endeavor it is to make egg rolls, nor does it begin to suggest how much tension a person can create in a household by serving egg rolls that take hours to make and are not nearly as good as Chinese takeout. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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

You'd be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money. — Nora Ephron

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

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 if it can clean up the mess in our minds. — Nora Ephron

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

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

Do you believe in love?" he said. Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that the only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it. "Yes," I said. "I do. — Nora Ephron

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

My religion is Get Over It. — Nora Ephron

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

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. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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

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

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

... 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

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

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.) — Nora Ephron

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

I feel really bad for people who aren't insane over food. — Nora Ephron

Of course, everyone has something wrong with him, that's for sure, but this guy probably had something really wrong. Perhaps — Nora Ephron

So Lillian Ross came to the party. Before dinner, she asked my mother for a tour of the house. My mother showed her around, and at a certain point, Ross came upon a picture of my three sisters and me. "Are these your children?" she asked my mother. "Yes," my mother said. "Do you ever see them?" Lillian Ross asked. That did it. My mother walked Lillian Ross downstairs and back to McKelway. "Out," she said. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

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

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

The truth is that men don't want to be friends with women. Men know they don't understand women, and they don't much care. They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they're not really interested in them as friends. They have friends. Men are their friends. And they talk to their male friends about sports, and I have no idea what else.
Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don't understand men, and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends with them, they would understand them and, what's more (and this is their gravest mistake), it would help. — Nora Ephron

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

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

Bernice Gera turned out to be only human, after all, which is not a luxury pioneers are allowed. — Nora Ephron

People have only one way to be. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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

2. I live in an apartment. I could never live anywhere but in an apartment. I love apartments because I lose everything. Apartments are horizontal, so it's much easier to find the things I lose
such as my glasses, gloves, wallet, lipstick, book, magazine, cell phone, and credit card. The other day I actually lost a piece of cheese in my apartment. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

I live in my neighborhood. My neighborhood consists of the dry cleaner, the subway stop, the pharmacist, the supermarket, the cash machine, the deli, the beauty salon, the nail place, the newsstand, and the place where I go for lunch. All this is within two blocks of my house. Which is another thing I love about life in New York: Everything is right there. If you forgot to buy parsley, it takes only a couple of minutes to run out and get it. This is good, because I often forget to buy parsley. — Nora Ephron