Quotes from Nora Ephron

If you don't want something, it's hard—in the movie business, especially.

We all have stories like that, stories we rely on to establish our charm in the beginning of relationships.

Por cada ejecutivo que cometía un error, una subrayadora a la que echar la culpa. Pero estábamos muy a principios de los sesenta, demasiado pronto para que yo me fijara en esas cosas y, además, empezaba a ver que probablemente nunca ascendería a redactora en Newsweek.

pudding I've ever eaten. It tastes like caramelized mush. Cream 2 cups sugar with 2 sticks butter. Then add 2 ½ cups milk, one 13-ounce can evaporated milk, 2 tablespoons nutmeg, 2 tablespoons vanilla, a loaf of wet bread in chunks and pieces (any bread will do, the worse the better) and 1 cup raisins. Stir to mix. Pour into a deep greased casserole and bake at 350° for 2 hours, stirring after the first hour. Serve warm with hard sauce.

Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from.

there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can't even buy a decent bagel. I don't mean to make it sound as if it's all about being Jewish, but that's another thing about Washington. It makes you feel really Jewish if that's what you are. It's not just that there are so many Gentiles there; it's that the Gentiles are so Gentile. Listen, even the Jews there are sort of Gentile.

For months I'd been doing nothing but boiling eggs and teaching my child to differentiate between the cat in the hat and the fox in socks and Jonathan Rice, the undersecretary of state was actually angry at me! It's stuff like this that got us into Cambodia.

My father said a lot of terrific daddy things to me that made me cry even harder, partly because the dialogue was completely lifted from an obscure Dan Daley movie he'd played a pediatrician in, and partly because he nevertheless delivered the lines so very well.

I couldn't believe that anyone would be so sexually driven that he might actually skip lunch-and after an auction! I think of myself as a healthy person with a strong sex drive, but it's never occurred to me to forgo meals.

Bernice Gera turned out to be only human, after all, which is not a luxury pioneers are allowed.

When will I ever understand that what's astonishing about the number of men who remain faithful is not that it's so small but that there are any of them at all?

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.

With hindsight, of course, I can see how brilliantly institutionalized the sexism was at Newsweek. For every man, an inferior woman. For every male writer, a female drone. For every flamboyant inventor of a meaningless-but-unknown detail, a young drudge who could be counted on to fill it in.

I've been crying for eight hours now, and he hasn't even noticed. I know, said Julie. When Alexandra was two I cried for eight months and she never noticed.

He says he's in love with her, I said. He told you this? said Arthur. Yes, I said. Why did he tell you this? said Arthur.

That's the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there's something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides to a nice, neat, simple one where one person has done something so horrible and unforgivable that the other person is immediately absolved of all the low-grade sins of sloth, envy, gluttony, avarice and I forget the other three.

Here's a strange thing: Whenever I read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them.

When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

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 twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And

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? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void. - You've Got Mail ? Nora Ephron

conciencia para que encaje en el molde de estos años».

Being single is a distraction. I mean one of the things about marriage that is good for both men and women is that it frees you from all that energy that you use to put into dating. You can put it into work. You don't have to worry about who is going to take you to the dinner party tomorrow. It takes time to be single, it seems to me.

I believed that when political activists claimed that news organizations conspired against them, they had no idea that most journalistic enterprises were far too inept to harbor conspiracy.

You can put makeup on your face and concealer under your eyes and dye on your hair, you can shoot collagen and Botox and Restylane into your wrinkles and creases, but short of surgery, there's not a damn thing you can do about your neck. The neck is a dead giveaway. 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.