NORA EPHRON

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

One good thing I'd like to say about divorce is that it sometimes makes it possible for you to be a much better wife to your next husband because you have a place for your anger - it's not directed at the person you're currently with.

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.

The best divorce is the kind where there are no children. That was my first divorce. You walk out the door and you never look back.