Top 200 Nora Ephron Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Nora Ephron

Featured in: Self-Esteem Quotes, Inspirational Quotes for Women, Personality Quotes, Motivational Quotes for Women, Being Strong Quotes

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

— Nora Ephron

Featured in: Positive Quotes for Women, Encouraging Quotes for Students

3. “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

Featured in: Relationship Quotes, Love Life Quotes, True Love Quotes, Longing Quotes, Soulmate Quotes

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

Featured in: Inspirational Quotes for Women, Motivational Quotes for Women

5. “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

6. “Take notes. Everything is copy.”

— 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. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

13. “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

14. “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

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. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

24. “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

25. “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

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. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

29. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

31. “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

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

— 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. “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

37. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

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. “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

46. “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

47. “I’ll have what she’s having.”

— Nora Ephron

48. “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

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

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron