Top 200 Nora Ephron Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I accomplished something, became a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on.”

— Nora Ephron

53. “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

54. “Everything is copy.”

— Nora Ephron

55. “You can’t meet someone until you become what you’re becoming.”

— Nora Ephron

56. “When I pass a bookshelf, I like to pick out a book from it and thumb through it. When I see a newspaper on the couch, I like to sit down with it... Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person.”

— Nora Ephron

57. “You’re talking dream date compared to my horror. I started out fine, she’s a very nice person, and we’re sitting and we’re talking in this Ethiopian restaurant she wanted to go to. I was making jokes, like, “Hey, I didn’t know they had food in Ethiopia. This’ll be a quick meal. I’ll order two empty plates and we can leave.”

— Nora Ephron

58. “I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I can’t believe I’m here without her.”

— Nora Ephron

59. “Believe me, if I looked good, it’s not an accident.”

— Nora Ephron

60. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

61. “I have a theory that children remember two things-when you weren’t there and when they threw up.”

— Nora Ephron

62. “My religion is Get Over It.”

— Nora Ephron

63. “According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at forty-three, and that’s that... The neck is a dead give-away. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck.”

— Nora Ephron

64. “And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands.”

— Nora Ephron

65. “I’ve always believed that the concept of the Jewish princess was invented by a Jewish prince who couldn’t get his wife to fetch him the butter.”

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

67. “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?”

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

69. “In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.”

— Nora Ephron

70. “The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it’s over.”

— Nora Ephron

71. “Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in it.”

— Nora Ephron

72. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

73. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

74. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

75. “Plastic surgery is one of the ways that people deal with the aging process. And I don’t mean by using it as a form of denial, but as a kind of negotiation with it.”

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

77. “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. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.”

— Nora Ephron

78. “We begin, I’m sorry to say, with hair. I’m sorry to say it because 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.”

— Nora Ephron

79. “What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick!”

— Nora Ephron

80. “Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.”

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

82. “Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it.”

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

84. “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?” So I told her why: Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”

— Nora Ephron

85. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

86. “The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.”

— Nora Ephron

87. “It’s always hard to remember love – years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?”

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

89. “Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.”

— Nora Ephron

90. “What is the answer?” Gertrude Stein asked Alice B. Toklas as Stein was dying. There was no reply. “In that case, what is the question?” Stein asked.”

— Nora Ephron

91. “One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older. I am, in fact, at this very moment gaining my looks.”

— Nora Ephron

92. “Washington is a city of locker-room boys, and all the old, outmoded notions apply: men and women are ushered to separate rooms after dinner, sex is dirty, and they are still serving onion-soup dip.”

— Nora Ephron

93. “What will happen to sex after liberation? Frankly, I don’t know. It is a great mystery to all of us.”

— Nora Ephron

94. “Getting older means you don’t have to shave your legs anymore.”

— Nora Ephron

95. “You’re born, you die. Everything in between is subject to interpretation.”

— Nora Ephron

96. “Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying.”

— Nora Ephron

97. “We all look good for our age. Except for our necks.”

— Nora Ephron

98. “The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.”

— Nora Ephron

99. “The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn’t it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.”

— Nora Ephron

100. “How much worse can it get than finishing dinner, having him reach over, pull a hair out of my head, and start flossing with it at the table?”

— Nora Ephron