110+ Nora Ephron Quotes On Aging, Friendship And Food

Nora Ephron was an American author, journalist, and filmmaker. She wrote and directed some of the most beloved romantic comedies of all time, including When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You've Got Mail. She was also a prolific author, writing several best-selling books, including Heartburn and I Feel Bad About My Neck. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Nora Ephron on aging, friendship, life.

Top 10 Nora Ephron Quotes

1. 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.
2. Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
3. I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
4. 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.
5. Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.
6. If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
7. My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.
8. Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.
9. 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.
10. If you're looking for monogamy, you'd better marry a swan.

Nora Ephron Image Quotes

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

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

Nora Ephron Short Quotes

• The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.
• Most of us live our lives devoid of cinematic moments.
• Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.
• Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.
• The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.
• There is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.
• I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like... magic.
• A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it.
• All that means is that it wasn't personal to you. But it was personal to me.
• The empty nest is underrated.

Nora Ephron Quotes About Aging

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

One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older. I am, in fact, at this very moment gaining my looks. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

You get to be a certain age and you start reading stuff about the age you are, and you think, what is wrong with these people who are writing these books? Do they not have necks? — Nora Ephron

Plastic surgery is one of the ways that people deal with the aging process. And I don't mean by using it as a form of denial, but as a kind of negotiation with it. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

We all look good for our age. Except for our necks. — 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

Nora Ephron Quotes About Life

Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead. — Nora Ephron

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

Let's face it: part of being a grownup is that every day you have to choose between going out at night or staying home, and it is one of life's unhappy truths that there is not enough time to do both. — Nora Ephron

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

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? — Nora Ephron

I definitely divide my life into decades. Almost every ten years, something in my work life has changed. My twenties were my journalistic phase, then there was my screenwriting phase, then I became a director, then I started doing some plays. — Nora Ephron

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

Black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black. — Nora Ephron

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron Quotes About Love

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

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. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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

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

To state the obvious, romantic comedies have to be funny and they have to be romantic. But one of the most important things, for me anyway, is that they be about two strong people finding their way to love. — Nora Ephron

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! — Nora Ephron

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

I've just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture: I was reading a book... I felt alive and engaged and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I've loved. — Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron Quotes About Food

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. — 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

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

people in New Orleans really care about food, care about it passionately, can spend hours arguing over whether Antoine's is better than Galatoire's or the other way around ... in New Orleans, there is basically nothing to do but eat and then argue about it. — Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron Quotes About Writing

The hardest thing about writing is writing. — Nora Ephron

One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there's no confusion about who's to blame: You are. — Nora Ephron

My parents were screenwriters, and they had four daughters and we all write. So that's amazing. Talk about powerful parents. My mother always said to us, "Everything is copy." — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all. — Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron Quotes About People

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy. — Nora Ephron

... when I finish reading People, I always feel that I have just spent four days in Los Angeles. Women's Wear Daily at least makes me feel dirty; People makes me feel that I haven't read or learned or seen anything at all. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

These days most women have jobs that last way too long. A lot of people in New York barely have time to get laid. — Nora Ephron

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

People have only one way to be. — Nora Ephron

I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron Quotes About Believed

My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you. — Nora Ephron

What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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? - has a kind of fun appeal. — Nora Ephron

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 — Nora Ephron

I actually believe in denial. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

Believe me, if I looked good, it's not an accident. — Nora Ephron

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

Nora Ephron Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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 — Nora Ephron

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

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

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. — Nora Ephron

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

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'. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

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

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

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. — Nora Ephron

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

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. — Nora Ephron

There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all. — 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

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. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

So, twice a week, I go to a beauty salon and have my hair blown dry. It’s cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting. — 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. - Sleepless in Seattle — 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

…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. — Nora Ephron

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

No one is more romantic than a cynic. I do think that you don't become cynical or 'unsentimental' unless there's a core of romanticism or sentiment that's had a few chips nicked into it. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

Washington is a city of locker-room boys, and all the old, outmoded notions apply: men and women are ushered to separate rooms after dinner, sex is dirty, and they are still serving onion-soup dip. — Nora Ephron

It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. I mean we've all read pieces where we thought, 'Oh, who gives a damn.' — Nora Ephron

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

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. — 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 don't want to be someone that you're settling for. I don't want to be someone that anyone settles for. Marriage is hard enough without bringing such low expectations into it, isn't it? — Nora Ephron

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

If your husband is cheating on you with a carhop, get Meryl Streep to play you. You'll feel much better. — 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

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

... 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. — 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

Having been married so many times, I know that one of the few things I am an expert in is falling in love. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

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. — Nora Ephron

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

You can blame Al Gore and you can blame Ralph Nader and you can blame George Bush, but I blame Bill [Clinton]. I just do. I just think he squandered his presidency the night that woman delivered that pizza to him, and if he hadn't, we wouldn't be where we are and there would be a lot of people who are alive today who aren't. — 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

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

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. — Nora Ephron

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. — 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

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

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. — Nora Ephron

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

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money. — Nora Ephron

Women are being considered as candidates for vice-president of the United States because it is the worst job in America. It's amazing that men will take it. A job with real power is first lady. I'd be willing to run for that. As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date. — Nora Ephron

Life Lessons by Nora Ephron

1. Nora Ephron taught us to be resilient in the face of adversity, to embrace our flaws and to always stay true to ourselves.
2. She also encouraged us to find joy in the little things, to be honest and to be generous with our time and energy.
3. Lastly, she showed us the power of humor and optimism, even in the darkest of times.