In Nora Ephron’s film You’ve Got Mail (1998), Joe Fox’s family runs the Fox Books chain. A new Fox Books store puts Kathleen Kelly’s small bookshop, The Shop Around the Corner, out of business. Joe borrows a line from The Godfather: “It’s not personal, it’s business.”
Kathleen rejects it. To her, the phrase means only that it was not personal to him. “But it was personal to me,” she says. A few lines later she adds: “Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”