Nora Ephron Quotes

Some people who've read my story think I had a terrible childhood and that I was neglected or even abused, while others feel that my parents, while certainly flawed, also had truly wonderful qualities. And that's the way it should be, because in real life two people can look at the same president and one will see a hero and the other a villain.

I didn't really feel I was being hurt, but you could feel it.

What's wrong is wrong, and that's absolutely acceptable, and I understand that people get hurt by things that people say that are hurtful, and we should be able to say that when someone says something that hurts us, that it hurts us.

Everyone reads the same words in a book but has a very clear picture of their own.

Play is play, fun is fun, and work is work. They're different. I work hard; even if it's supposed to be fun for someone else, it's work for me.

My idea of growing old gracefully is probably different to other people's!

I try to make all the action in my movies subjective: to give a sense of what it would feel like to actually be a part of it.

'Gunday' might not be the best film of my life, but it's been a life-altering film for me.

What is my truth can not be your truth.

Something that's a hilarious comedy, for someone else might be a drama.

We never want to go out there and hurt each other, so when it happens, it's emotional.

My view is my view. Your view is your view.

We all look at the same object in different ways.

Whether something is sensible or not is subjective. What is sensible to me might not be for others.

To say the 'Save My Soul' video means a lot to me would be an understatement of stupendous proportions.

If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who.. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus.

The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

the size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider’s measurement of it but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it.

it's gonna hurt because it matters.

I can tell you my feelings were hurt.

Maybe it's not as important to you as it was for me, but that's not for you to decide.

... we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.