Top 50 Nigella Lawson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I don’t wear anything in bed. But I’m not ready for a nude scene quite yet.”

— Nigella Lawson

2. “And cooking is about balance and harmony.”

— Nigella Lawson

3. “I don’t like conflict.”

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

5. “There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness.”

— Nigella Lawson

6. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

7. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

9. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

10. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

14. “I don’t believe in low-fat cooking.”

— Nigella Lawson

15. “Everyone wants to be young, beautiful and rich. I don’t say that scornfully: there are worse things to want to be. But that’s why, for example, people don’t begrudge Kate Moss how much she earns for a day’s work but will fulminate over the take-home pay of some fat, old Water Board exec.”

— Nigella Lawson

16. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

17. “Glamour really has to do with good lighting, doesn’t it?”

— Nigella Lawson

18. “You cannot truly say you live well unless you eat well.”

— Nigella Lawson

19. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

23. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

24. “I don’t believe you can ever really cook unless you love eating.”

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

27. “It’s true that I wouldn’t have written the first book had my sister and mother been alive. It was my way of continuing our conversation. It’s also this Jewish thing of naming and remembering people, and I think there is a sense of keeping that side of life going.”

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

30. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

31. “Clean eating necessarily implies that any other form of eating – and consequently the eater of it – is dirty or impure and thus bad, and it’s not simply a way of shaming and persecuting others, but leads to that self-shaming and self-persecution that is forcibly detrimental to true healthy eating.”

— Nigella Lawson

32. “It s easier to impress someone than to give them pleasure.”

— Nigella Lawson

33. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

34. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

35. “I despair of the term ‘clean eating’... it necessarily implies that any other form of eating – and consequently the eater of it – is dirty or impure and thus bad.”

— Nigella Lawson

36. “I was a quiet teenager, introverted, full of angst.”

— Nigella Lawson

37. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

38. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

39. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

41. “I think sometimes that people assume because I’m on television I’m an expert, but I think the whole point of what I do is that I’m not and I don’t have any training. My approach isn’t about a fancy ingredient or style. I cook what I love to eat.”

— Nigella Lawson

42. “Gordon Ramsay makes me laugh because he knows that I’m not a chef.”

— Nigella Lawson

43. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

45. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

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

— Nigella Lawson

48. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

49. “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.”

— Nigella Lawson

50. “I need to be frightened of things. I hate it, but I must need it, because it’s what I do.”

— Nigella Lawson