Quotes from Nora Ephron

I use those medical gloves that fit very tightly and are disposable for all chopping - peppers, onions, garlic, etc. Very Lady Macbeth, I think.

These days most women have jobs that last way too long. A lot of people in New York barely have time to get laid.

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.

All I do when I write scripts is think about food: 'Have I worked long enough to justify a walk to the kitchen?'

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.

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

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.

The one thing my mother did make was what was known at the time as lox and onions and eggs. Now, no one makes it with lox; they make it with nova. That was my mother's specialty, which she cooked on New Year's Day for the Rose Bowl games, which we had a party for every year. It took her about an hour to make scrambled eggs.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.

What failure ofimagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possiblities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?

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

'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 have been forgetting things for years - at least since I was in my 30s. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.

Having been married so many times, I know that one of the few things I am an expert in is falling in love.

If only I had grown up worshipping Julia Child. I was already grown up - thank you very much - when Julia Child's book was published. When I moved to New York in 1962, you had to own it.

Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was 26. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're 34.

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.

I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regrettedmost of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.