Best Nora Ephron Quotes & Sayings

Nora Ephron explained in a 1996 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, about her own graduating class of 1962: "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." Both — Rebecca Traister

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

Take notes. Everything is copy. — Nora Ephron

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

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

I have been forgetting things for years - at least since I was in my 30s. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to. — Nora Ephron

Arthur and Julie and Mark and Rachel. The Siegels and the Feldmans. It's not just that we were best friends - we dated each other. We went steady. That's one of the things that happens when you become a couple: you date other couples. We saw each other every Saturday night and every Sunday night, and we had a standing engagement for New Year's Eve. Our marriages were tied together. We — Nora Ephron

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

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

Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties. — Nora Ephron

I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can't believe I'm here without her.- on losing her best friend — Nora Ephron

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

Whenever someone says the words 'Our friendship is more important than this,' watch out, because it almost never is. — Nora Ephron

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

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

One thing I have never understood is how to work it so that when you're married, things keep happening to you. Things happen to you when you're single. You meet new men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married, and the hair grows in. I love the everydayness of marriage, I love figuring out what's for dinner and where to hang the pictures and do we owe the Richardsons, but life does tend to slow to a crawl. — 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

One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older. I am, in fact, at this very moment gaining my looks. — Nora Ephron

Getting older means you don't have to shave your legs anymore. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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

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 — Nora Ephron

Look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, and nun. — Nora Ephron

Now I know that there's no such thing as the truth. That people are constantly misquoted. That news organizations are full of conspiracy (and that, in any case, ineptness is a kind of conspiracy). That emotional detachment and cynicism get you only so far. But for many years I was in love with journalism. I loved the city room. I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking scotch and playing dollar poker. I didn't know much about anything, and I was in a profession where you didn't have to. I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines. I loved that you wrapped the fish. You can't make this stuff up, I used to say. — Nora Ephron

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

I survived turning 60, I was not thrilled to turn 61, I was less thrilled to turn 62, I didn't much like being 63, I loathed being 64, and I will hate being 65. I don't let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it's sad to be over 60. — Nora Ephron

I don't want to be someone that you're settling for. I don't want to be someone that anyone settles for. Marriage is hard enough without bringing such low expectations into it, isn't it? — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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

'Sleepless' was a script that had been written by three or four other writers before me, and it never really worked, but it had this amazing ending on the top of the Empire State Building that just worked, no matter what came before it. — 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

That [photographs] disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that's why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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