Top 251 Quotes & Sayings by Nora Ephron - Page 2

I don't think there was ever a dish that changed my life. I certainly remember a constant series of things that I had for the first time and thought, 'Where has this been all my life?' One was brie. I mean, oh my God! One was my first soft-shell crabs.

When we were working on 'Julie & Julia,' I went back to the Julia Child cookbook and made some things I haven't made in a while, one being beef bourguignon, which to me is a hilariously 1960s dish that everyone felt they had to serve at a dinner party or they weren't a grown-up.

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.

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.

I don't have writer's block, really. I do have times when I can't get the lead, and that is the only part of the story which I have serious trouble with. 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.

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

I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about - and I think there are some writers who do that - but that hasn't happened to me. I do think it's dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error.

Food was supposed to be a slightly bigger part of 'Heartburn,' and it actually didn't turn out to be because of me. I just didn't find a way to make it a bigger part of the movie as I should have, and we cut several scenes in which food was a major character.

All I do when I write scripts is think about food: 'Have I worked long enough to justify a walk to the kitchen?'

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.

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.

Everything matches black, especially black.

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

Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.

Take notes. Everything is copy.

That's your problem! You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.

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.

You can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

That's another thing about being a certain age that I've noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror.

Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them.

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.

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

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.

Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it's your last, or do you save your money on the chance you'll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in American is so unbelievable delicious? And what about chocolate?

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.

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.

Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from.

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

No man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her. Sex is always out there. Friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.

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

[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.)

I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal 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.

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.

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

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.

Why do people write books that say it's better to be older than to be younger? It's not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you're constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday.

Everybody dies. There's nothing you can do about it. Whether you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.

I think if you're lucky enough to find a voice in whatever you do, that voice will come sneaking out no matter what.

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

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.

The hardest thing about writing is writing.

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.

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

The realization that I may have only a few good yeras 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.

When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.

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

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

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

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.

You can't meet someone until you become what you're becoming.

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.'

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.

Most of us live our lives devoid of cinematic moments.

Maybe young women don't wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands.

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? "

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.

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.

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. So I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.

One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don't take it personally, but listen hard to what's going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged.