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

I'm planning to give up worrying. I want to, but I'm worried I won't be able to. — Delia Ephron

One cannot overstate the potential for hysteria on a movie set. Everyone always acts as if making the movie is as important as eradicating malaria. — Delia Ephron

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

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

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

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are. — 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

It consists entirely of people who are not related by blood, many of whom can't stand each other. — Delia Ephron

Another thing you end up doing when you get older, is you spend so much time sort of trying desperately to keep from just looking just a little older. You're just constantly putting stuff on your face and having things removed from yourself and opening up copies of "Vogue" so that you can find new ways to throw whatever money you've managed to save into the arms of some doctor who has just come up with a new way of lasering your face that feels like electroshock and all these things. — 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

I just want to go on making movies, and some of them will be completely meaningless, except, of course, to me. — 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 buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn't really work. So then you don't go back to it. The new Ina Garten cookbook, which is called 'Back to Basics,' I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends. — 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

God, secrets could simply do you in. — Delia Ephron

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

I live in New York City. I could never live anywhere else. The events of September 11 forced me to confront the fact that no matter what, I live here and always will. One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me. — Nora Ephron

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

My religion is Get Over It. — Nora Ephron

In the end, I always want potatoes. Mashed potatoes. 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. The problem with mashed potatoes, though, is that they require almost as much hard work as crisp potatoes, and when you're feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make the mashed potatoes for you, but let's face it: the reason you're blue is that there isn't anyone to make them for you. — Nora Ephron

One quarter of what you buy will turn out to be mistakes. — Delia Ephron

I haven't given any thought to collaborating with my sisters. It would be great fun. My daughter Molly is a wonderful writer - someday I'd love to collaborate with her. — Hallie Ephron

Clothes have special power. I'll always remember the raspberry colored v-necked silk sweater I was wearing on my husband and my first date. If I hadn't been wearing that sweater that night, would any of it have happened? — Delia Ephron

You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy. — Nora Ephron

Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together ... and I knew it. I knew it the very first time I touched her. It was like coming home ... only to no home I'd ever known ... I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like ... magic.
- Sleepless in Seattle — Nora Ephron

Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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

Checked out the mirror to see if I looked older, or sadder, or wiser. I didn't; I just looked tired. — Nora Ephron

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

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

A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it ... — Nora Ephron

But he also felt a stitch of hesitation. Did God put him in the same room with Rabin so that he could eliminate the Israeli leader and his Oslo process? Or would Amir be imposing his own plan on God? He thought about the bullets in his magazine, the hollow points and the regular rounds. Then he turned his gaze back to Rabin and watched him leave the hall; Amir had missed his chance. But he gleaned valuable information. Rabin was hardly protected. If protests didn't stop the peace process, killing him might be a viable alternative. At home, he related the events to Hagai. It was too early, he told his brother. He needed to build his inner readiness. — Dan Ephron

Well, I'm gonna get out of bed every morning ... breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out ... and, then after a while, I won't have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while.
- Sleepless in Seattle — Nora Ephron

[I] had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now, I cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don't bump into vinaigrettes that good.) — Nora Ephron

I always say that a successful parent is one who raises a child so that they can pay for their own psychoanalysis. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

The neck starts to go at 43, and that's that. — Nora Ephron

When I first met him, he had a recurrent nightmare that Henry Kissinger was chasing him with a knife, and I said it was really his father, and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and I said it was his father and he said it was Henry Kissinger, and this went on for months until he started going to the Central American shrinkette, who said Henry Kissinger was really his younger sister. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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

She has bitten into a crisp juicy apple and wondered if the bite and the thought were connected
one never knew what went together, and seemingly random acts could be cosmically related. — Delia Ephron

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.
[Commencement Address, Wellesley College, 1996] — 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

Working as a journalist is exactly like being the wallflower at an orgy. I always seem to find myself at a perfectly wonderful event where everyone else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes on it all. — Nora Ephron

The only way to learn is to keep doing something new, and, if you're lucky, learning with people who really know how to do it. — 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

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

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

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

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

'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

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

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

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

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

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 was always decoding. I was hyperalert.
Being hyperalert is a lasting thing. Being a watcher. Noticing emotional shirts, infinitesimally small tremors that flit over another person's face, the jab in a seemingly innocuous word, the quickening in a walk, an abrupt gesture - the way, say, a jacket is tossed over a chair. — Delia Ephron

How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

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

Phoebe Wolkind Ephron cracked wise like Dorothy Parker and looked like Katharine Hepburn. — Hallie Ephron

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

I know that I am essentially a sort of fun-loving person who really just wants to sit around and eat pies. — Nora Ephron

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know. — Nora Ephron

I wish he were better at hailing taxis than I am; on the other hand, I realize that expectation is culturally conditioned, utterly foolish, has nothing to do with anything, is exactly the kind of thinking that ought to be got rid of in our society; on still another hand, having that insight into my reaction does not seem to calm my irritation. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

Being in your twenties has changed a lot since I was in my twenties, but it is still a time everything awful that happens is awful in a romantic way, even if you don't admit it (and you can't admit it because then you would be less important in the tragedy you're starring in, your own life) ... because in your twenties you know, even if you don't admit this either, even if this is buried deep in your subconscious, that you can waste an entire decade and still have a life. — Delia 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

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