Nigella Lawson Quotes

I am not a chef. I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is as an eater.

You could probably get through life without knowing how to roast a chicken, but the question is, would you want to?

I was a quiet teenager, introverted, full of angst.

You cannot truly say you live well unless you eat well.

Sometimes...we don't want to feel like a postmodern, postfeminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake.

Sometimes it's good just to be seduced by the particular cheeses spread out in front of you on a cheese counter.

I am always surprised when people read double entendres into my innocuous babble.

I don't believe in low-fat cooking.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

I don't believe you can ever really cook unless you love eating.

Cooking is actually quite aggressive and controlling and sometimes, yes, there is an element of force-feeding going on.

Cake baking has to be, however innocently, one of the great culinary scams: it implies effort, it implies domestic prowess; but believe me, it's easy.

Good olive oil, good butter, milk - they give food taste and depth and a richness that you cant reproduce with low-fat ingredients.

I do think awful things may happen at any moment, so while they are not happening, you may as well be pleased.

There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness.

(In cooking), there is always room for careful tinkering.

Anyway, what makes people look youthful is the quality of their skin and I don't think you can change that.

I am not sure about facelifts because I wouldn't want to be someone who just looks like she's had a facelift.

Glamour really has to do with good lighting, doesn't it?

Some people did take the domestic goddess title literally rather than ironically. It was about the pleasures of feeling like one rather than actually being one.

Emotion is messy, contradictory... and true.

I wasn't good with authority, went to lots of schools, didn't like the fact that there was no autonomy.

Gordon Ramsay makes me laugh because he knows that I'm not a chef.

And cooking is about balance and harmony.

I used to refer to myself as Typhoid Mary. It wasn't that I was jinxed, I just seemed to bring ill fortune to anybody I was close to.

I'm not much of a drinker. I'm an eater more than a drinker. So I feel that I don't have to wait to get a hangover in order to eat these.

I can understand why those primitive desert people think a camera steals their soul. It is unnatural to see yourself from the outside.

There is something wrong about being photographed that has nothing to do with vanity.

In fact I am quite snappy and irritable, and I don't know if I'd like to make myself worse in that respect.

Then again, they're not scripted and I feel it's virtually impossible to be anything but yourself when you're in front of the cameras and cooking so there is a measure of truth in what you see.

I never have plans for the future as you never know how things will turn out.

At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety.

In England and America people tend to graze all day long, but I think it's such a waste to be constantly picking at food because you then can't enjoy a proper full meal when the time comes.

People who have fabulous childhoods have this sense that nothing is ever going to be that good again. With me, I have the sense that nothing is going to be that bad.

I need to be frightened of things. I hate it, but I must need it, because it's what I do.

I don't like conflict.

You need a balance in life between dealing with whats going on inside and not being so absorbed in yourself that it takes over.

I lurch from chaos to chaos. I can't find my driving licence and my clothes are everywhere - cooking is the neatest thing I do.

You don't go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.

On the whole, I prefer Christmas as an adult than I did as a child.

I am determined that my children should have no financial security. It ruins people not having to earn money.

There is a vast difference between how things seem from the outside and how they feel on the inside.

It s easier to impress someone than to give them pleasure.

Also, in a funny way, if you have been happily married there are no unresolved areas, nothing to prove to yourself after the other dies.

I'm not someone who's endlessly patient and wonderful.

It sounds like something on a very trite T-shirt, but life is what happens.

The thing I liked about writing about food when I started it was that I felt I was writing about food in a different way. Not like a food writer.

And, in a funny way, each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up.

Statistically, people who have been happily married and then widowed tend to remarry.

If I could go into the woods and kill a bear myself, I'd wear it proudly as a trophy.