Nora Ephron Quotes

You know when I was 20 and 30, they were insecurities. Now they're just a new normal. I'm 60 years old, so my expectations of who I am and how I look and how I show up in the world had to shift. Not because I couldn't help it, or not because I did anything wrong, but because I had to get into the natural flow of my being as a woman.

I feel like I've lived about three or four different lives.

You get to a certain age, and you feel like you know who you are, and how you fit into the world, and how the world sort of perceives you. And you get pretty set in that. And then things can happen that can turn it upside.

All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.

I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me.

I feel like I didn't know who I was when I was 15. I don't feel like you're who you are for life, not even when you're 20.

I think I've probably re-invented myself three or four times now, if that's what one calls it.

Maybe in my 20s I was a little more lively. But I'm done with that.

You can't tell what's going to fulfill you in different stages in your life.

When you're younger and traveling and visiting new countries and cities, that stuff is exciting; it's flashy, it's shiny, but I always had this separation between who I was as a person and who I was as a player.

Getting older, getting married, buying a house, becoming a different person... I had to figure out what my new motivations, inspirations, and goals were.

If my 20s were a time when the way I looked was my calling card, then it feels as though my 60s will be a reinvention.

I know, for a fact, that I'm a very different person on my own than I am with someone else. We are different with each other. These things are constantly adjusted. And that's true of humans. That's not just true of famous people.

Be yourself. If you try to be someone else, it won't work. Whatever you do, you are not going to make everyone happy.

When you have the opportunity to choose projects, inevitably you start being moved towards the things that you're moved by, right? And that changes over time, as we change, right?

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I'm old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I've been a diarist. I'm not ashamed of it.

I'm in a different chapter of my life. As time goes by and I grow older, I find that I need to just be quiet and think. There have been periods when I've locked myself away for days, but now it's different - I'm married and we have a daughter who is in my office the whole time.

...fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me? (140)

Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.

Maybe mom is my alter ego and the woman I'm able to be when I'm working.

You can't be who you are going to be and who you used to be at the same time.

It's like there was me, then the Beatles phase, and now I'm me again.

I had already made a decision early on that I would be a plain girl with tons of personality, and accepting it made everything a lot easier. If you are lucky, there is a moment in your life when you have some say as to what your currency is going to be. I decided early on it was not going to be my looks. I have spent a lifetime coming to terms with this idea and I would say I am about 15 to 20 percent there.Decide what your currency is early. Let go of what you will never have. People who do this are happier and sexier.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.

You've got to show the world who you are before it tells you. Otherwise you become victim to someone you're not.