Nora Ephron Quotes

I have something to confess: I am addicted to food. And I will go to great lengths to get what I want.

The only way to get through life is to laugh your way through it. You either have to laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh. Crying gives me a headache.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.

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.

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

I will never understand why they cook on TV. I can’t smell it. Can’t eat it. Can’t taste it. The end of the show they hold it up to the camera, ‘Well, here it is. You can’t have any. Thanks for watching. Goodbye.’

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

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

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.

Good breakfasts are like easy marriages. They’re exciting and comforting all at once, enviable and easygoing, the ideal hot affair, the ideal cool marriage.

Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.

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

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.

Flower arranging is a place where tension, anxiety and aggression can all be expressed and released in a boatload of petals and stamens.

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

You can’t retrieve burned toast, but you can always make another piece. When you’re dead, you’re dead. No spinach on earth is going to change that.

When you’re down, eat ice cream. When you’re up, eat ice cream. And if you ever feel stuck in the middle, have a double scoop.

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.

Nothing feels as good as being loved by the people who matter most to you. Period. Fin.

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

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

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

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.

Sleep well and stay woke.

I have a theory that movies operate on the level of dreams, where you dream yourself.

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

When I was young, everyone wore hats. Sometimes they wore them to keep their heads warm. Sometimes they wore them to make them look glamorous. Or dignified.

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.

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

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

There’s no point in making pie crust from scratch. Buy a ready-to-roll one. They’re fine.

What holds most people back isn’t the quality of their ideas, but their lack of faith in themselves. You have to live as if you already have what you’re seeking.

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.

Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.

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

If I write it down it will become truth.

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

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

We may be left with only the dregs of Judaism, but no one can take the dregs of Judaism away from us.

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.

Parodies are what the best of us do unintentionally.

I thank God for my iPhone. I can’t imagine what I did before I could take a photo, add 16 different ways to a message, and plaster it all over Facebook and Twitter as soon as I thought of it.

Looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about fifty years old.

If you find yourself wondering if somebody loves you, that means they don’t. Nobody who loves you will put you on the phone on hold.

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.

Successful people don’t look embarrassed when they’re asked to sing at a wedding.

One of my biggest regrets in life is giving considerable thought to inconsiderate people.

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.

Never marry a man who hates his mother because he’ll end up hating you.

If you don’t like something, make your own version and spread the word.