Nora Ephron Quotes

When you're 21, you think, 'Oh God, when I'm 36, oh God, that's nearly 40 and I'll look really old and wrinkly by then.' And actually, I quite like the way I look.

When you hit your 40s, you're walking around, and you realize, 'Oh, my God, men don't look at me anymore.' Or sometimes you can feel really good, and then you look in the mirror, and you're like, 'Oh, Jesus, that's my face now!' But I have tell you that something happened and shifted inside of me.

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.

When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.

I feel like 35. At 35 you're old enough to know something and young enough to look forward to what you can do with the knowledge. So I stayed at 35!

I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.

You get to be a certain age - I am 58 - and it becomes tricky not to become a caricature of yourself.

If you've never been 40, you don't understand how it feels.

I've always thought 45 to 55 is a great time for guys: Your body has filled out. Your face doesn't look old, but you're weathered enough to look like you know what you're talking about.

The feelings we all have as 50-year-olds are different than the feelings we all have as 30-year-olds. That informs everything we do.

But the body fails us and the mirror knows, and we no longer insist that the gray hush be carried off its surface by the cloth, for we have run to fat, and wrinkles encircle the eyes and notch the neck where the skin wattles, and the flesh of the arms hangs loose like an overlarge sleeve, veins thicken like ropes and empurple the body as though they had been drawn there by a pen, freckles darken, liver spots appear, the hairah, the hair is exhausted and gray and lusterless, in weary rolls like cornered lint.

I would agree on the aging thing. Because, at a certain point, once you start noticing it, it is your subject. And I know young that people, when they get to 30, say, "Oh, I'm so old." But actually, around 50, you do become conscious of it.

I don't think there is a woman in her 40s who doesn't, kind of, examine herself in the mirror.

There are a lot of smart people being really thoughtful and writing really interesting things, but that isn't what I want to do. It's never felt like what I've been called to do. And I have to risk sounding really arrogant when I say that because I've gone to Ivy League schools and been privileged in all these ways in the world of ideas, but I'm not as smart as you think. I'm not really depending on what I learned in college to write my books. Those were just parts of my life experience.

It's funny to see my friends going through that middle-age thing about losing their hair. I went through it in college. They all say, "Oh my God, I'm getting old. I'm never getting laid again." Shut up. Yes, you are.

It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.

The common foible of women who have been handsome is to forget that they are no longer so.

Man tends to think that he is a creator, that he is like God. This is especially true of intellectuals, and in the last century, intellectuals tended to forget that they were like everyone else. Writing this book was a description of man going from a state of God back to a state of man, back to being a normal person.

There's nothing good about being my age.

I am resolved to grow fat, and look young till forty.

I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all.

I just see myself as a short, dumpy guy with bad feet, and I'm passionate.

I see a guy getting old. I try to not look in the mirror too much.

It eventually appeared to be me, cinematically. When I was writing it I was actually an author, you know, writing a book. ... But there certainly is a difference in energy between a younger man and an older man.

I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.