Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off...

The major concrete achievement of the women’s movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s...

Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.

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.

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets

There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can’t tell which way is...

It seemed to me that the desire to get married – which, I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women – is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal...

Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)

If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.

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

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.

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...

Joan is very funny. I’m always telling her she’s a fraud: Everyone thinks she’s fragile and humorless, when we all know she’s wildly funny and the last surviving member of the Donner party.

Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it

I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can’t...

It’s always hard to remember love – years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending...

When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.

[S]ometimes, when you are a food person, the possible irrelevance of what you are doing doesn’t cross your mind until it’s too late. (Once, for example, when I was just starting out in the food...

The desire to get married, which – I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women – is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal urge – which is to...

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...

In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old. But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or...

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...

I don’t care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.

Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex...

New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.)

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...

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

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

Dale the Thug.

I love trash. I have never believed that kitsch kills. I tell you this, so you will understand that my antipathy toward ‘Love Story’ is not because I am immune to either sentimentality or garbage,...

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

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

The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it’s over.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...

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...

There are plenty of men who philander during the summer, to be sure, but they are usually the same lot who philander during the winter-albeit with less convenience.

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out...

What will happen to sex after liberation? Frankly, I don’t know. It is a great mystery to all of us.

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...

People always say that once it goes away, you forget the pain. It’s a cliché of childbirth: you forget the pain. I don’t happen to agree. I remember the pain. What you really forget is...

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...

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

It was personal to me.” ~Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) in You’ve Got Mail

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

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

The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It’s followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.

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

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.

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