Nora Ephron Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Nora Ephron
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.

Nora Ephron
The anecdote is a particularly dehumanising sort of descriptive narrative.

Nora Ephron
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.

Nora Ephron
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.

Nora 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.

Nora Ephron
I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out.

Nora Ephron
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.

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

Nora Ephron
Vera said: Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story? So I told her why. 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 me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with 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
You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.

Nora Ephron
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.

Nora Ephron
Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

Nora 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.

Nora Ephron
Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn't cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldn't cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it's Rachel Samstat, she's bright, she's funny and she can cook!

Nora Ephron
You can never have too much butter – that is my belief. If I have a religion, that's it,

Nora Ephron
No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her…The sex thing is always out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.

Nora Ephron
It seemed to me that the desire to get married—which, I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women—is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal urge, which is to be single again.

Nora Ephron
On parenting:
A successful parent is one who raises a child who grows up and is able to pay for his or her own psychoanalysis.

Nora Ephron
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.

Nora Ephron
In a socialist country you can get rich by providing necessities, while in a capitalist country you can get rich by providing luxuries.

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

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

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

Nora 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
Consciousness-raising is at the very least supposed to bring about an intimacy, but what it seems instead to bring about are the trappings of intimacy, the illusion of intimacy, a semblance of intimacy.

Nora Ephron
I am not a new journalist, whatever that is. I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.

Nora Ephron
My closet is full of sad little scripts that didn't get made that have sad endings. It's very hard to get a movie made that has a sad ending.

Nora Ephron