Nigella Lawson Quotes

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.

As quoted by Nigel Slater regarding "OFM Best Food Personality 2014", The Guardian Archive.org (19 October 2014)

[Asked if cookery writing is a form of intimacy] I think there both is and isn't. I feel that writing about food allows one to be utterly honest, and personal, and in no way guarded. But, in some sense, it's a metaphor for the personal, rather than being actually personal. It's not revelatory, I would say. It's personal without being confessional. That's the kind of personal that I feel more comfortable with.

Sometimes I think food preoccupies me too much. [...] The only thing that keeps me going at the theatre is thinking about what I'll eat afterwards, although now I bring sandwiches because I can't bear it

Everybody likes to think cooks are nurturing, but maybe we're just controlling – controlling what people eat.

But I do think that women who spend all their lives on a diet probably have a miserable sex life: if your body is the enemy, how can you relax and take pleasure? Everything is about control, rather than relaxing, about holding everything in.

[A]ll food images, if they are successful, have the power to arouse appetite. They should be luscious and sexy. I have no embarrassment about the culinary come-on. But that's the limit of my erotic intent. I am always surprised when people read double entendres into my innocuous babble.

The trouble with modern cooking is that the mood it induces in the cook is one of skin-of-the-teeth efficiency, all briskness and little pleasure.

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.

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.

It's not meant to be flirtatious. Listen, I don't have a presenting style, I'm just me. I don't have the talent to adopt a different persona. It's intimate, not flirtatious.

It's like I can never watch myself on TV unless I have to do some editing before a show comes out. It's like hearing your voice back on a tape recorder and I'm sure you know how horrible that is. I always look for the worst things in myself - criticising my hair and stuff. I'm very self-conscious about it all.

There are two Christmas traditions I've inherited from my mother. One is the feeling that Christmas isn't complete if you haven't got a ham as well as a turkey. It means that the leftovers are much better. And in a curious way, despite the fact that we're talking about Christmas and ham, it's a very Jewish thing to want to provide a huge spread. I always cook for eight, but make enough to feed 30...

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

Cooking aside, I am what you'd call a domestic slut. Cooking is really the only domestic activity I enjoy. I would do anything not to do the normal bits of household work - it's not one of my strong points.