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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Nora Ephron Quotes

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

– Nora Ephron

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

– Nora Ephron

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

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

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

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

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?’

– 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

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.

– Nora Ephron

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.

– 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

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.

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

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

– 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

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

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

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

– 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

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

– Nora Ephron

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.

– 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.

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

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.

– Nora Ephron

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