Nigella Lawson Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I don't like conflict.

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

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

I was brought up an atheist and have always remained so. But at no time was I led to believe that morality was unimportant or that good and bad did not exist. I believe passionately in the need to distinguish between right and wrong and am somewhat confounded by being told I need God, Jesus or a clergyman to help me to do so.

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

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

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.

I think we all live in a world that is so fast-paced, it's threatening and absolutely saturated with change and novelty and insecurity. Therefore, the ritual of cooking and feeding my family and friends, whoever drops in, is what makes me feel that I'm in a universe that is contained.

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

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

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

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

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

I know the crew so well, so I forget I'm being filmed. It's like cooking with a friend in the kitchen - you're talking, as you do, and maybe you're telling her about this wonderful way to prepare lamb chops - it's more natural, more honest.

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

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

Tension translates to your guests. They'll have a much better time having chili and baked potatoes than they would if you did roast duck with a wild cherry sauce and then had to lie down and cry for a while.

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

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

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

I was shy as a child. Now I'm not really shy any more, unless I'm with shy people. I find it contagious and I don't know what to say. But I don't think shyness is something one should feel apologetic about.

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.

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 don't wear anything in bed. But I'm not ready for a nude scene quite yet.

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

I think maybe when you live with someone who is really very ill for a long time, it somehow gives you more of a greedy appetite for life and maybe, yes, you are less measured in your behaviour than you would otherwise be.

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

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

And cooking is about balance and harmony.

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.

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.

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

I took a fortnight off. But I'm not a great believer in breaks. I don't want to be rattling around inside my own head. I did feel I was spiralling into a Kathy Burke character and tried going out, but I prefer it here. Filming keeps me busy. It absorbs me.

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

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.

Emotion is messy, contradictory... and true.

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

But if you know that something has been really vicious, you don't read it, you don't let it into your head. What's damaging is when sentences go through your head and you burn with the injustice of it.

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.