Nora Ephron Quotes

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

When 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.

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.

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.

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

If you're looking for monogamy, you'd better marry a swan.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

[on the screenplay for "When Harry Met Sally"] 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 now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work.

The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.

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

We have lived through the era when happiness was a warm puppy, and the era when happiness was a dry martini, and now we have come to the era when happiness is 'knowing what your uterus looks like'.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.)

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

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

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

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.'

The hardest thing about writing is writing.

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

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.

Most of us live our lives devoid of cinematic moments.

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.

I recognize that printing pictures of corpses raises all sorts of problems about taste and titillation and sensationalism; the fact is, however, that people die. Death happens to be one of life's main events. And it is irresponsible and more than that, inaccurate, for newspapers to fail to show it.

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

A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.