Nora Ephron

I'm religious about salted butter. I don't understand how it happened that everyone thought we should all have sweet butter. I blame the French.

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

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.

I grew up with fantastic Southern food. In Southern California.

I think when you get older, things come along that you know are a test in some way of your ability to stay with it. And when e-mail came along, I was just going to fall in love with it. And I did. I can't believe it now - it's like one of those ex-husbands that you think, 'What was I thinking?'

Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know - it's everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.

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.

Eat every meal as if its your last when the last one comes you probably wont be very hungry.

The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven't.

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

We're saved somewhat by Google. You can - when you're all sitting around the table desperately snapping your fingers in the hopes of remembering the name of that movie that you can't remember the name of - you can make people think that you are not as old as you actually are because you have the technology to find the answer.

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

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.

Nothing like mashed potatoes when you're feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin, cold slice of butter to every forkful.

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

I just want to go on making movies, and some of them will be completely meaningless, except, of course, to me.

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.

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.

Writing is what I do. It's like breathing to me at a certain point, but if I couldn't write, I do like cooking.

Food was supposed to be a slightly bigger part of 'Heartburn,' and it actually didn't turn out to be because of me. I just didn't find a way to make it a bigger part of the movie as I should have, and we cut several scenes in which food was a major character.

I'm a good cook, and I look at something like 'Iron Chef' and think, 'It's a good thing I already know how to cook' - because I would never think I could do it if I watched these shows.

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.

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.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.

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.

Marriages come and go but divorces are forever.

I was alive during the women's lib movement, and I do not remember anyone taking a position against cooking. I think they were talking about other things.

I was always proud of being tough-minded, and I think I still am, but in my old age I've got a little softer in the head, and that's all right.

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

Summer bachelors like summer breezes are never as cool as they pretend to be.

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.

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.

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.

What will happen to sex after liberation? Frankly, I don't know. It is a great mystery to all of us.

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

The truth is that most marriages have food as a major player in them, and certainly mine does.

Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.

Plastic surgery is one of the ways that people deal with the aging process. And I don't mean by using it as a form of denial, but as a kind of negotiation with it.

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

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.

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

One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there's no confusion about who's to blame: you are.

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.

You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will.

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

Directing movies is the best job there is, that's all. I can hardly say a word after that. It's just a great job.

If you're looking for monogamy, you'd better marry a swan.

Every 10 years or so, there was a moment when I'd say, even subconsciously, 'Is that all there is?' You've got to find ways to keep it fresh for yourself.

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

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

In California, of course, they never break up couples at dinner for fear of what might happen if someone's husband were seated next to someone else's very young girlfriend. But dinners with couples seated next to one another are always deadly dull, which is why there are almost no good dinner parties in the entire state of California.

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.

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

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

Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial.

I just bring a black turtleneck sweater everywhere - it's the greatest purchase of my life. Period.

Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up.

I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are?'

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

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

Everyone loves fried chicken, Don't ever make it. Ever. Buy it from a place that makes good fried chicken.

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

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.

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.