Great Throughts Treasury

"There isn’t an ugly girl in American who wouldn’t exchange her problems for the problems of being beautiful; I don’t believe there is a beautiful girl anywhere who would honestly prefer to not be."

"I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive."

"When you find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

"Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim."

"I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

"When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you."

"When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first, that way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side."

"In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind."

"Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficity disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss."

"My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next."

"I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it)."

"I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times."

"And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream."

"You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be."

"Whenever you give up an apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there" is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a vistor, the city seems to turn against you. It's much more expensive (because you need to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don't mind this when you live here; when you live here, it's part of the caffeinated romance to this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, your experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you've always been loyal to, and the bakery's gone. Your dry cleaner move to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maitre d' at P.J. Clarke's quits, and you realize you're going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the down. You've turned your back from only a moment, and suddenly everything's different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you're just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia. Meanwhile, you rad that Manhattan rents are going up, they're climbing higher, they're reached the stratosphere. It seems that the moment you left town, they put a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again."

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

"It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, They lived happily ever after and the following quarter-century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know it just might work. "

"With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie."

"From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one."

"We have lived through the era when happiness was a warm puppy, and the era when happiness was a dry martini, and now we have come to the era when happiness is "knowing what your uterus looks like."

"1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong."

"A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, ?Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,? because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven?t produced anything, and that?s the end of the career."

"A successful parent is one who raises a child who grows up and is able to pay for his or her own psychoanalysis."

"A while back, my friend Graydon Carter mentioned that he was opening a restaurant in New York. I cautioned him against this, because it?s my theory that owning a restaurant is the kind of universal fantasy everyone ought to grow out of, sooner rather than later, or else you will be stuck with the restaurant. There are many problems that come with owning a restaurant, not the least of which is that you have to eat there all the time. Giving up the fantasy that you want to own a restaurant is probably the last Piaget stage."

"Above all be the heroine of your life, not the victim."

"As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date."

"American society has a remarkable ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away."

"At one point I looked down and couldn't tell which fingers were his and which were mine. And I knew ... I knew we'd be together forever and that everything would be wonderful."

"As a longtime journalist, this one from Nora Ephron made me smile in recognition of its truth: Working as a journalist is exactly like being the wallflower at the orgy...everyone else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back groom, and I am standing on the side taking notes."

"As Harry puts it, men and women can never be friends because 'the sex part always gets in the way."

"Beware of men who cry. It?s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own."

"Believe me. If I look good, it's not an accident."

"Enough about that. The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me. And now it's not."

"Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address."

"Destiny is something we've invented because we can't stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental."

"Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn?t cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldn?t cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it?s Rachel Samstat, she?s bright, she?s funny and she can cook!"

"Everybody dies. There?s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. (Although there?s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there?s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don?t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, Everything happens for a reason, I would like to smack her.)"

"Don't underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is 'Don't take it personally,' but listen hard to what's going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally."

"Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor but they couldn't possibly all have good taste."

"Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? and I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! I mean, it's not as if I wasn't a writer. It's not as if I hadn't often written about myself. I'd even written about him. What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life?"

"First of all, whatever you do, work in a field that has something to do with writing or publishing. So you will be exposed to what people are writing about and how they are writing, and as important, so you will be exposed to people in the business who will get to know you and will call on you if they are looking for someone for a job."

"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."

"HARRY: (Voice-over) The first time we met we hated each other. SALLY: (Voice-over) You didn?t hate me, I hated you. (beat) And the second time we met, you didn?t even remember me. HARRY (Voice-over) I did too, I remembered you. (a long beat) The third time we met, we became friends. SALLY:(Voice-over) We were friends for a long time. HARRY:(Voice-over) And then we weren?t. SALLY: (Voice-over) And then we fell in love. SALLY Three months later we got married. HARRY It only took three months. SALLY Twelve years and three months."

"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."

"He was, in his way, as close to a Zen master as I've ever had, and all of us who fell under his influence began with his style and eventually ended up with our own."

"Hey, how about... oh, how about some coffee or, you know, drinks or dinner or a movie... for as long as we both shall live?"

"Help! I?m drowning. I have 112 unanswered email messages. I?m a writer?imagine how many unanswered messages I would have if I had a real job. Imagine how much writing I could do if I didn?t have to answer all this email. My eyes are dim. I have a mild case of carpal tunnel syndrome. I have a galloping case of attention deficit disorder because every time I start to write something, the email icon starts bobbing up and down and I?m compelled to check whether anything good or interesting has arrived. It hasn?t? In the brief time it took me to write this paragraph, three more messages arrived. Now I have 115 unanswered messages. Strike that: 116."

"Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it?s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you?ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in American is so unbelievable delicious? And what about chocolate?"

"Here?s what a parent is: a parent is a person who has children. Here?s what?s involved in being a parent: you love your children, you hang out with them from time to time, you throw balls, you read stories, you make sure they know which utensil is the fork, you teach them to say please and thank you, you see that they have an occasional haircut, and you ask if they did their homework."

"Hollywood is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it ? the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that ? so that means that about 50 percent of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don?t even wanna be in it!"