Nora Ephron

"Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble."

"My parents had drinks and there were crudités for us- although they were not called crudités at the time, they were called carrots and celery."

"People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate."

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

"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."

"There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all."

"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."

"Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of w"

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

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