Quotes from Nora Ephron

I cannot understand any woman's wanting to be the first woman to do anything. ... It is a devastating burden and I could not take it, could not be a pioneer, a Symbol of Something Greater.

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

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.

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.

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

For a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me. And now it's not. Now the most important thing about me is that I'm old."

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

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.

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.

Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.

Whenever someone says the words 'Our friendship is more important than this,' watch out, because it almost never is.

It seemed to me that 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

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

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

There is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.

If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters.

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

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.

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.

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.

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

I'll have what she's having.

What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

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