Top 45 Nora Ephron Quotes

Nothing like mashed potatoes when you’re feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin, cold slice of butter to every forkful.

I just bring a black turtleneck sweater everywhere – it’s the greatest purchase of my life. Period.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.

When we were working on ‘Julie & Julia,’ I went back to the Julia Child cookbook and made some things I haven’t made in a while, one being beef bourguignon, which to me is a hilariously 1960s dish that everyone felt they had to serve at a dinner party or they weren’t a grown-up.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.

I have now been married to my third husband for more than 20 years. But when you’ve had children with someone you’re divorced from, divorce defines everything; it’s the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.

The neck starts to go at 43, and that’s that.

I buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn’t really work. So then you don’t go back to it. The new Ina Garten cookbook, which is called ‘Back to Basics,’ I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends.

I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about – and I think there are some writers who do that – but that hasn’t happened to me. I do think it’s dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error.

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child’s problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

I grew up with fantastic Southern food. In Southern California.

One good thing I’d like to say about divorce is that it sometimes makes it possible for you to be a much better wife to your next husband because you have a place for your anger – it’s not directed at the person you’re currently with.

I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women’s movement didn’t realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, ‘Don’t you see how oppressed you are?’

I feel really bad for people who aren’t insane over food.

Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.

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.

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

Everyone loves fried chicken, Don’t ever make it. Ever. Buy it from a place that makes good fried chicken.

I think when you get older, things come along that you know are a test in some way of your ability to stay with it. And when e-mail came along, I was just going to fall in love with it. And I did. I can’t believe it now – it’s like one of those ex-husbands that you think, ‘What was I thinking?’

Everybody dies. There’s no avoiding it, and I do not believe for one second that butter is the cause of anyone’s death. Overeating may be, but not butter, please. I just feel bad for people who make that mistake.

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.

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

Here are some questions I am constantly fretting over: Do you splurge, or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live 20 more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long?

When you’re young, you think that clothes are almost magical, and that if you wear the right thing – to school, to the prom, on the date, etc. – something’s going to happen. Black, it’s the anti-magical thing. It comes from the recognition that it is not going to be ‘the’ dress.

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.

You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can’t put things off thinking you’ll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will.

Directing movies is the best job there is, that’s all. I can hardly say a word after that. It’s just a great job.

I am the kind of person who really will drive hours for a bowl of chili. I’m not a three-star restaurant kind of a person; I’m just a food person.

My second divorce was the worst kind of divorce. There were two children; one had just been born. My husband was in love with someone else.

‘Sleepless’ was a script that had been written by three or four other writers before me, and it never really worked, but it had this amazing ending on the top of the Empire State Building that just worked, no matter what came before it.

I don’t think there was ever a dish that changed my life. I certainly remember a constant series of things that I had for the first time and thought, ‘Where has this been all my life?’ One was brie. I mean, oh my God! One was my first soft-shell crabs.

The truth is that most marriages have food as a major player in them, and certainly mine does.

I just want to go on making movies, and some of them will be completely meaningless, except, of course, to me.

I was always proud of being tough-minded, and I think I still am, but in my old age I’ve got a little softer in the head, and that’s all right.

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.

I don’t have writer’s block, really. I do have times when I can’t get the lead, and that is the only part of the story which I have serious trouble with. 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.

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

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

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.

Every 10 years or so, there was a moment when I’d say, even subconsciously, ‘Is that all there is?’ You’ve got to find ways to keep it fresh for yourself.

Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up.

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. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.

I’m religious about salted butter. I don’t understand how it happened that everyone thought we should all have sweet butter. I blame the French.

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.

I was alive during the women’s lib movement, and I do not remember anyone taking a position against cooking. I think they were talking about other things.