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The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.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

To state the obvious, romantic comedies have to be funny and they have to be romantic. But one of the most important things, for me anyway, is that they be about two strong people finding...

That’s the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there’s something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides to a nice, neat, simple one...

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

My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

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.

Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

I love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above...

The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries

I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart...

Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

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

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...

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

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

I think what’s unexpected is that you keep reading it will happen and hearing it will happen, and then when it happens you find yourself genuinely thrilled on behalf of women.

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...