Nora Ephron Quotes

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

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

From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

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

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!

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.

I don't know why so much nonsense about age is written - although I can certainly understand that no one really wants to read anything that says aging sucks.

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.

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?

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

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

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.

In the way that women forget the pain of childbirth, men forget that they cry in movies.

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

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.

All that means is that it wasn't personal to you. But it was personal to me.

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

People have only one way to be.

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.

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.

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.

Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in it.

…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.

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

[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.)

Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying.

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.

The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.

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.

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.

Take notes. Everything is copy.

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

What failure ofimagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possiblities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?

I have for many years been puzzled by the persistence of Hugh Hefner. Why is he still here?

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.

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.

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

As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.

I’m really not interested in women as victims. Look at me, I get the last laugh ‘cause I get to be funny about it.

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.

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.

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

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

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. I know exactly where I'm going as soon as I have the lead.

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

[Wellesley College] is about as meaningful to the educational process in America as a perfume factory is to the national economy.

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

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.