99 Nora Ephron Quotes from Famous American Filmmaker

Nora Ephron was an American author, playwright, screenwriter and film director known for her romantic comedies featuring strong female characters and biting wit.

Born into a family of Hollywood screenwriters, she started her career as a reporter and essayist before moving to scriptwriting and filmmaking.

She received Academy Award nominations for her screenplays of ‘Silkwood’, ‘When Harry Met Sally…’ and ‘Sleepless in Seattle’, the latter of which she also directed.

She collaborated with Meryl Streep on several projects, including the hit ‘Julie & Julia’.

Nora Ephron

Ephron wrote best-selling essay collections and plays and continued her work until her death in 2012, leaving a lasting legacy in various literary and cinematic genres.

Nora Ephron was famous for creating romantic comedies.

I have collected the best quotes by Nora Ephron.


Best Nora Ephron Quotes

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Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead. ~ Nora Ephron.

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I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don’t. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I’m not. ~ Nora Ephron.

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In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50-years-old. ~ Nora Ephron.

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

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I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are. ~ Nora Ephron.

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Getting older means you don’t have to shave your legs anymore. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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It’s much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It’s followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again. ~ Nora Ephron.

Famous Nora Ephron Quotes

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There is no reason to confuse television news with journalism. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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.

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.

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The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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.

Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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.

Top Nora Ephron Quotes

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Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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

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.

“What did she look like?” Thin. Pretty. Big tits. Your basic nightmare. ~ Nora Ephron.

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. ~ Nora Ephron.

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Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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

That’s your problem! You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie. ~ Nora Ephron.

Popular Nora Ephron Quotes

Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be. ~ Nora Ephron.

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A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it… ~ Nora Ephron.

Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don’t mean to be too literal about this. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money. ~ Nora Ephron.

The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it’s over. ~ Nora Ephron.

When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does. ~ Nora Ephron.

I actually believe in denial. ~ Nora Ephron.

Most of us live our lives devoid of cinematic moments. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

I have for many years been puzzled by the persistence of Hugh Hefner. Why is he still here? ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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.

Inspiring Nora Ephron Quotes

In the way that women forget the pain of childbirth, men forget that they cry in movies. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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You can’t meet someone until you become what you’re becoming. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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.

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

I know that I am essentially a sort of fun-loving person who really just wants to sit around and eat pies. ~ Nora Ephron.

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

If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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.

The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women. ~ Nora Ephron.

American society has a remarkable ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away. ~ Nora Ephron.

Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from. ~ Nora Ephron.

Ultimate Nora Ephron Quotes

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.

If your husband is cheating on you with a carhop, get Meryl Streep to play you. You’ll feel much better. ~ Nora Ephron. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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? ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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.

Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Take notes. Everything is copy. ~ Nora Ephron.

Wise Nora Ephron Quotes

Too few journalists become screenwriters. I say to all the would-be screenwriters: Become journalists. And I’ll say to working journalists: Do not stay journalists. Become screenwriters. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The empty nest is underrated. ~ Nora Ephron.

Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to a shortage of men, but otherwise not worth the trouble. ~ Nora Ephron.

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In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. ~ Nora Ephron.

Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them. ~ Nora Ephron.

I have a theory that children remember two things-when you weren’t there and when they threw up. ~ Nora Ephron.

The hardest thing about writing is writing. ~ Nora Ephron.

Great Nora Ephron Quotes

Believe me, if I looked good, it’s not an accident. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

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.

You can’t call yourself a feminist if you don’t believe in the right to abortion. ~ Nora Ephron.

Black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

I always say that a successful parent is one who raises a child so that they can pay for their own psychoanalysis. ~ Nora Ephron.

Working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallflower at an orgy. ~ Nora Ephron.

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.

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party. ~ Nora Ephron.

I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from. ~ Nora Ephron.


So these were the 99 top Nora Ephron quotes and sayings about love, friendship, writing, life, marriage and food.

If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes and Nido R. Qubein quotes.

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Chandan Negi
Chandan Negi

I’m the Founder of Internet Pillar - I love sharing quotes and motivational content to inspire and motivate people - #quotes #motivation #internetpillar