Nora Ephron Quotes

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.

Too few journalists become screenwriters. I say to all the would-be screenwriters: Become journalists. And I’ll say to working journalists: Do not stay journalists. Become screenwriters.

There is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.

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

The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.

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

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

…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.

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.

I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like... magic.

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.

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

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

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

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?

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

A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it.

The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women.

You can't call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in the right to abortion.

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.

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.

American society has a remarkable ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away.

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

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.

Journalists are interesting. They just aren't as interesting as the things they cover.

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

The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.

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

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

I’m really not interested in women as victims. Look at me, I get the last laugh ‘cause I get to be funny about it.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

People have only one way to be.

Working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallflower at an orgy.

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

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?

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

If Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue he would never have wondered what women want.

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.

All that means is that it wasn't personal to you. But it was personal to me.

I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don't. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I'm not.

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

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