Nora Ephron Quotes

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

“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.”

“Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person…. Reading is bliss.”

“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”

“… 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 am truly beside myself.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Stare at me in this faceless way, go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off. It's terrific. In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. The fantasy of rape — of which mine is in a kind of prepubescent sub-category — is common enough among women and (in mirror image) among men.”

“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.”

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

“I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up….

You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).”

“Insane people are always sure they're just fine. It's only the sane people who are willing to admit they're crazy.”

“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.”

“When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”

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

“[W]hen 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.”

“Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.”

“When you're attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match.
- Sleepless in Seattle”

“…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.”

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

“I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don't. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I'm not.”

“I look as young as a person can look given how old I am.”

“The hardest thing about writing is writing.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The odd thing about this form of communication is you're more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many… somethings. So, thanks.”

“As Harry puts it, men and women can never be friends because 'the sex part always gets in the way.”

“If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.”

“Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.”

“MARIE    I’m saying that the right man for you might be out there right now and if you don’t grab him, someone else will, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that someone else is married to your husband.”

“I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride's disease.”

“I was so tired of seeing these stupid, cheerful books about ageing. One of them even has this whole thing in it about how you are going to have the greatest sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. Which is just garbage.I thought about it and realised that there was one circumstance that you could have the best sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. That would be if you had never had sex until you were 60 or 70.”

“[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!”

“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 entering a third era, in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work.”

“The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you're not involved in any more because you've already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news — did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it?”

“Plastic surgery is a way for people to buy themselves a few years before they have to truly confront what ageing is, which of course is not that your looks are falling apart, but that you are falling apart and some-day you will have fallen apart and ceased to exist.”

“I moved into directing for a couple of reasons. … Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they’re going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, "Why am I out there looking for directors?" — because you look at a list of directors, it’s all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, "I’m just gonna become a director and that’ll make it easier."”