Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from failure is that it's entirely possible you will have another failure.

— Nora Ephron

Harry Burns: You realize of course that we could never be friends. Sally Albright: Why not? Harry Burns: What I'm saying is - and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form - is that men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way. Sally Albright: That's not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved. Harry Burns: No you don't. Sally Albright: Yes I do. Harry Burns: No you don't. Sally Albright: Yes I do. Harry Burns: You only think you do. Sally Albright: You say I'm having sex with these men without my knowledge? Harry Burns: No, what I'm saying is they all WANT to have sex with you. Sally Albright: They do not. Harry Burns: Do too. Sally Albright: They do not. Harry Burns: Do too. Sally Albright: How do you know? Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her. Sally Albright: So, you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive? Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail 'em too. Sally Albright: What if THEY don't want to have sex with YOU? Harry Burns: Doesn't matter because the sex thing is already out there, so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story. Sally Albright: Well, I guess we're not going to be friends then. Harry Burns: I guess not. Sally Albright: That's too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.

— Nora Ephron

Here's the thing about dessert--you want it to last. You want to savor it.

— Nora Ephron

I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out.

— Nora Ephron

I buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn't really work. So then you don't go back to it. The new Ina Garden cookbook, which is called 'Back to Basics,' I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends.

— Nora Ephron

I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would just be an intermission. I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. Furthermore, I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I'd turned out to be right.

— Nora Ephron

I had no jealousy of work, no jealousy of money. I was just jealous of women who took advantage of men, because I didn't know how to do it.

— Nora Ephron

I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realize how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are?'

— Nora Ephron

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

— Nora Ephron

I have now been married to my third husband for more than 20 years. But when you've had children with someone you're divorced from, divorce defines everything; it's the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.

— Nora Ephron