Top 200 Nora Ephron Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, and nun.”

— Nora Ephron

152. “One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there’s no confusion about who’s to blame: You are.”

— Nora Ephron

153. “I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be – feminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half bad at being a woman.”

— Nora Ephron

154. “I’ll tell you how sensible Arthur is: he doesn’t even mind being bald.”

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

156. “As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren’t even people I would date.”

— Nora Ephron

157. “Try flying any plane with a baby if you want a sense of what it must have been like to be a leper in the fourteenth century.”

— Nora Ephron

158. “I live in my neighborhood. My neighborhood consists of the dry cleaner, the subway stop, the pharmacist, the supermarket, the cash machine, the deli, the beauty salon, the nail place, the newsstand, and the place where I go for lunch. All this is within two blocks of my house. Which is another thing I love about life in New York: Everything is right there. If you forgot to buy parsley, it takes only a couple of minutes to run out and get it. This is good, because I often forget to buy parsley.”

— Nora Ephron

159. “You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy.”

— Nora Ephron

160. “You’d be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins.”

— Nora Ephron

161. “I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.” From.”

— Nora Ephron

162. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

163. “You don’t really have to believe what you write in a blog for more than the moment when you’re writing it. You don’t bring the same solemnity that you would bring to an actual essay.”

— Nora Ephron

164. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

165. “Journalists are interesting. They just aren’t as interesting as the things they cover.”

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

167. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

168. “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.”

— Nora Ephron

169. “Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.”

— Nora Ephron

170. “Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.”

— Nora Ephron

171. “I discovered then that the world I was living in was so much more interesting than the world I was capable of conceiving.”

— Nora Ephron

172. “It’s always a shock to the people who run studios when a movie that is for women is a hit. They have an infinite capacity to be shocked.”

— Nora Ephron

173. “Here’s the thing about dessert – you want it to last. You want to savor it.”

— Nora Ephron

174. “Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from failure is that it’s entirely possible you will have another failure.”

— Nora Ephron

175. “Craig was a nice guy, don’t get me wrong, but he was so low-key that once I’d gotten to know him, I was almost completely unable to have even imaginary conversations with him while cooking his recipes. Around.”

— Nora Ephron

176. “Let’s face it: part of being a grownup is that every day you have to choose between going out at night or staying home, and it is one of life’s unhappy truths that there is not enough time to do both.”

— Nora Ephron

177. “I don’t write a word of the article until I have the lead. It just sets the whole tone – the whole point of view. I know exactly where I’m going as soon as I have the lead.”

— Nora Ephron

178. “Try flying any plane with a baby if you want a sense of what it must have been like to be a leper in the fourteenth century, but try the shuttle for the ultimate in shunning. All those men in suits, looking at you as if your baby is going to throw up over their speech drafts; all those men in suits who used to look at me with respect when I pulled out my American Express gold card, now barely able to conceal their contempt for me and my portable Wet Ones.”

— Nora Ephron

179. “I have been forgetting things for years – at least since I was in my thirties. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time. I have proof. Of course, I can’t remember exactly where I wrote about it, or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.”

— Nora Ephron

180. “We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don’t quite believe it.”

— Nora Ephron

181. “You never know.”

— Nora Ephron

182. “Of course, everyone has something wrong with him, that’s for sure, but this guy probably had something really wrong.”

— Nora Ephron

183. “The internet is the superhighway of grammatically incorrect moral outrage. EPHRON:.”

— Nora Ephron

184. “You know, everything adds up. It’s what I keep saying in my books and in Cosmo. If you do every little thing you can do in your own modest position, one thing leads to another. So do it and be it and write the letters and make the phone calls and get on with it.”

— Nora Ephron

185. “But the main problem with our marriages was not that our husbands wouldn’t share the housework but that we were unbelievably irritable young women and our husbands irritated us unbelievably. – The D Word.”

— Nora Ephron

186. “On some level, my life has been wasted on me. After all, if I can’t remember it, who can?”

— Nora Ephron

187. “He was, in his way, as close to a Zen master as I’ve ever had, and all of us who fell under his influence began with his style and eventually ended up with our own.”

— Nora Ephron

188. “I was a journalist and I liked to watch. I was in awe.”

— Nora Ephron

189. “The truth is, most of the genuinely tragic episodes of lost food are things that are somewhat outside the reach of the home cook, even a home cook like me who has been known to overreach from time to time.”

— Nora Ephron

190. “Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.”

— Nora Ephron

191. “And then it hit me: he doesn’t love me. It hit me with a shimmering clarity: that was all there was to it. It didn’t matter if he was crazy. It didn’t matter if I was innocent or guilty. Nothing mattered except that he didn’t love me. If I throw this pie at him, he will never love me. But he doesn’t love me anyway. So I can throw the pie if I want to. I picked up the pie and thanked God for the linoleum floor, and threw it.”

— Nora Ephron

192. “When I first met him, he had a recurrent nightmare that Henry Kissinger was chasing him with a knife, and I said it was really his father, and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and I said it was his father and he said it was Henry Kissinger, and this went on for months until he started going to the Central American shrinkette, who said Henry Kissinger was really his younger sister.”

— Nora Ephron

193. “Helen is one of those people who never say anything, not because she’s shy but because she’s learned – in a way I always mean to – that if you don’t say anything, you make people far more nervous and self-conscious and careful around you than if you do. People like me, we just rush into the vacuum of silence people like Helen float around in; we blather and dither and yakyakyak, and people like Helen just sit there and smile into the wind.”

— Nora Ephron

194. “The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, the extraordinary novel that changed my life and the lives of so many other young women in the 1960s. I have the paperback copy I read at the time, and it’s dog-eared, epiphany after epiphany marked so that I could easily refer back to them. Does anyone read The Golden Notebook nowadays? I.”

— Nora Ephron

195. “We’d grown up in an era when no one was divorced, and suddenly everyone was divorced.”

— Nora Ephron

196. “People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.”

— Nora Ephron

197. “That’s what a marriage is... Pieces break off, and you glue them back on.”

— Nora Ephron

198. “At the age of fifty-five you will get a saggy roll just above your waist even if you are painfully thin. This saggy roll just above your waist will be especially visible from the back and will force you to reevaluate half the clothes in your closet, especially the white shirts.”

— Nora Ephron

199. “I can’t believe they don’t understand that what I’m doing is Much More Important. I’m reading the most wonderful book.”

— Nora Ephron

200. “All beginnings are intrinsically happy.”

— Nora Ephron