What happens to me when I'm provoked is that I get tongue-tied and my mind goes blank. Then I spend all night tossing and turning trying to figure out what I should have said

Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.

Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

Well, at least this time I get to be a person in the story. The last time you told one of your Russian parables I was a bag of chickens.

Above all, be the heroine of your life.

I must try this again, I thought; I must try again someday to sit still and not say a word. Maybe when I'm dead.

He loved Thelma, Jonathan said, he had never loved anyone but Thelma, he had loved Thelma for nineteen years and would always love her even though Thelma didn't give a rat's ass about him and never had.

Checked out the mirror to see if I looked older, or sadder, or wiser. I didn’t; I just looked tired.

You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy.

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are." --Nora Ephron

Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.

Men … I hate them. I’ve always hated them. You wonder why I always hang around with women and never with men, it’s because men do things like this.

Sometimes I think that not having to worry a bout your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

Death doesn't really feel eventual or inevitable. It still feels... avoidable somehow. But it's not. We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don't quite believe it.

People always say that once it goes away you forget the pain. It's a cliche of childbirth. You forget the pain. I don;t happen to agree. I remember the pain. What you really forget is love.

We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don’t quite believe it.

I think I was so entranced with being a couple that I didn’t even notice that the person I thought I was a couple with thought he was a couple with someone else.

My parents had drinks and there were crudit s for us- although they were not called crudit s at the time, they were called carrots and celery.

But the main problem with our marriages was not that our husbands wouldn’t share the housework but that we were unbelievably irritable young women and our husbands irritated us unbelievably. - The D Word

Of course, everyone has something wrong with him, that’s for sure, but this guy probably had something really wrong. Perhaps

Black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.

Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave?

I’ve always believed that the concept of the Jewish princess was invented by a Jewish prince who couldn’t get his wife to fetch him the butter. I was not raised as

The truth is, most of the genuinely tragic episodes of lost food are things that are somewhat outside the reach of the home cook, even a home cook like me who has been known to overreach from time to time.

Everything is copy.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.

One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

I guess all that's left is to love the fire.

Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.

Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.