Top 45 Nora Ephron Quotes

I use those medical gloves that fit very tightly and are disposable for all chopping – peppers, onions, garlic, etc. Very Lady Macbeth, I think.

I’m a good cook, and I look at something like ‘Iron Chef‘ and think, ‘It’s a good thing I already know how to cook’ – because I would never think I could do it if I watched these shows.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up.

‘Sleepless‘ was a script that had been written by three or four other writers before me, and it never really worked, but it had this amazing ending on the top of the Empire State Building that just worked, no matter what came before it.

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

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

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.

I have now been married to my third husband for more than 20 years. But when you’ve had children with someone you’re divorced from, divorce defines everything; it’s the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.

I grew up with fantastic Southern food. In Southern California.

I survived turning 60, I was not thrilled to turn 61, I was less thrilled to turn 62, I didn’t much like being 63, I loathed being 64, and I will hate being 65. I don’t let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over 60.

I don’t care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.

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.

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.

When you’re young, you think that clothes are almost magical, and that if you wear the right thing – to school, to the prom, on the date, etc. – something’s going to happen. Black, it’s the anti-magical thing. It comes from the recognition that it is not going to be ‘the’ dress.

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.

I just want to go on making movies, and some of them will be completely meaningless, except, of course, to me.

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

Everything matches black, especially black.

I feel really bad for people who aren’t insane over food.

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

I am the kind of person who really will drive hours for a bowl of chili. I’m not a three-star restaurant kind of a person; I’m just a food person.

I was alive during the women’s lib movement, and I do not remember anyone taking a position against cooking. I think they were talking about other things.

Every 10 years or so, there was a moment when I’d say, even subconsciously, ‘Is that all there is?’ You’ve got to find ways to keep it fresh for yourself.

I just bring a black turtleneck sweater everywhere – it’s the greatest purchase of my life. Period.

Everyone loves fried chicken, Don’t ever make it. Ever. Buy it from a place that makes good fried chicken.

I’m religious about salted butter. I don’t understand how it happened that everyone thought we should all have sweet butter. I blame the French.

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.

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.

Nothing like mashed potatoes when you’re feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin, cold slice of butter to every forkful.

Writing is what I do. It’s like breathing to me at a certain point, but if I couldn’t write, I do like cooking.

Everybody dies. There’s no avoiding it, and I do not believe for one second that butter is the cause of anyone’s death. Overeating may be, but not butter, please. I just feel bad for people who make that mistake.

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

Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial.

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

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.

I think when you get older, things come along that you know are a test in some way of your ability to stay with it. And when e-mail came along, I was just going to fall in love with it. And I did. I can’t believe it now – it’s like one of those ex-husbands that you think, ‘What was I thinking?’

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. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.

The truth is that most marriages have food as a major player in them, and certainly mine does.

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

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.