Nora Ephron
46 quotes
Biography
"Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim."
"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."
"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."
"I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regrettedmost of them, but never the potatoes that went with them."
"When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you."
"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?"
"Stare at me in this faceless way, go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off. It's terrific. In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. The fantasy of rape — of which mine is in a kind of prepubescent sub-category — is common enough among women and (in mirror image) among men."
"I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive."
"Insane people are always sure they're just fine. It's only the sane people who are willing to admit they're crazy."
"Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride's disease."
"It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are entering a third era, in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work."
"[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!"
"I moved into directing for a couple of reasons. ... Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they're going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, "Why am I out there looking for directors?" — because you look at a list of directors, it’s all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, "I’m just gonna become a director and that’ll make it easier.""
"The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you're not involved in any more because you've already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news — did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it? — has a kind of fun appeal."
"Plastic surgery is a way for people to buy themselves a few years before they have to truly confront what ageing is, which of course is not that your looks are falling apart, but that you are falling apart and some-day you will have fallen apart and ceased to exist."
"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."
"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."
"In order for it to be good, it had to be honest on both sides [to both sexes]. Nora taught me how she sees men and how she sees me and that's what I got from her more than anything, aside from the fact that she's so funny."
"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."
"Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be."
"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."
"My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next."
"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."
"As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date."
"I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are."