Top 200 Nora Ephron Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Nora Ephron

Featured in: Encouraging Quotes

2. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

3. “Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead.”

— Nora Ephron

4. “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

5. “Take notes. Everything is copy.”

— Nora Ephron

6. “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

7. “The only way to learn is to keep doing something new, and, if you’re lucky, learning with people who really know how to do it.”

— Nora Ephron

8. “The hardest thing about writing is writing.”

— Nora Ephron

9. “Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.”

— Nora Ephron

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

10. “In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50-years-old.”

— Nora Ephron

11. “That’s your problem! You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.”

— Nora Ephron

12. “And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.”

— Nora Ephron

13. “What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications.”

— Nora Ephron

14. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

15. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

16. “The empty nest is underrated.”

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Nora Ephron

22. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

23. “There is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.”

— Nora Ephron

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

28. “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

29. “Eat every meal as if it’s your last; when the last one comes, you probably won’t be very hungry.”

— Nora Ephron

30. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

31. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

33. “We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions, or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.”

— Nora Ephron

34. “Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave?”

— Nora Ephron

35. “What did she look like?” “Thin. Pretty. Big tits. Your basic nightmare.”

— Nora Ephron

36. “Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.”

— Nora Ephron

37. “Alcoholic parents are so confusing, they’re your parents, so you love them. But they’re drunks, so you hate them. But you love them, but you hate them. They have moments when they’re still the people you grew up idolizing. They have moments when you can’t imagine they were anything but monsters. And then, after a while they’re monsters full time. The people they used to be has enormous power over you. But the people they’ve turned into has no power over you at all.”

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

Featured in: Fun Quotes

39. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

44. “Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to a shortage of men, but otherwise not worth the trouble.”

— Nora Ephron

45. “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

46. “I’ll have what she’s having.”

— Nora Ephron

47. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

49. “People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate.”

— Nora Ephron

50. “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.”

— Nora Ephron