Top 70 Padma Lakshmi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am a sufferer of endometriosis. I didn’t want any young women to go through what I went through. I thought that people should know about it.”

— Padma Lakshmi

2. “An oil massage, a hot bath, a good night’s sleep, soft smells and music and clothes with soft textures denote sensuality to me.”

— Padma Lakshmi

3. “I’m not tough. I’m tenacious.”

— Padma Lakshmi

4. “I always loved my bangles, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a bangle on.”

— Padma Lakshmi

5. “People always comment about my clothes. They don’t think a fashionable woman can love food and be knowledgeable and actually cook.”

— Padma Lakshmi

6. “In truth, I am a single mother. But I don’t feel alone at all in parenting my daughter. Krishna has a whole other side of her family who loves her, too. And so Krishna is parented by me, but also by her grandmother and aunts and cousins and uncles and friends.”

— Padma Lakshmi

7. “I know most people use their phones to tell time, but there’s something very romantic and beautiful about a timepiece.”

— Padma Lakshmi

8. “I love seafood. I’m not a vegetarian but I’m probably a pescetarian.”

— Padma Lakshmi

9. “I have a great career, and I have my daughter. Sio what I don’t have is not as important to as what I do have.”

— Padma Lakshmi

10. “Whenever I’m in sync with the trends, it’s always an accident. I still love wearing clothes I’ve had for ten years. I think understated luxury is the chicest thing.”

— Padma Lakshmi

11. “It doesn’t matter how precisely the onion is cut as long as the person chewing it is happy.”

— Padma Lakshmi

12. “When there is little you can do, you do what you can.”

— Padma Lakshmi

13. “DON’T wear loud clanging bangles at work, it’s disruptive and noisy and your coworkers won’t appreciate it! Bangles should have a gentle wind-chimey tinkle, not the crash bang of a million pots and pans.”

— Padma Lakshmi

14. “Commitment is easy before a relationship requires compromise and obligation.”

— Padma Lakshmi

15. “I’m not attached to things at all. I’m very lucky to have quite a few beautiful things, but if I look back at my life, I was often happiest when I had very little.”

— Padma Lakshmi

16. “She had sculpted the mist, the way those who have no choice do. She had willed a life for the two of us in a new land.”

— Padma Lakshmi

17. “A name is a marker of identity but there are markers we cannot change, like the color of our bodies.”

— Padma Lakshmi

18. “The great thing about living today is that there is this thing called the Interweb, and you can just look up anything.”

— Padma Lakshmi

19. “Whether I’m making a recipe or a piece of jewelry or a white-rose-and-jasmine tea or the perfume, I like to think of myself as a happy little sorceress, and if I could just have a little general store with all that stuff and give people a sense of my taste, that would be lovely.”

— Padma Lakshmi

20. “From the simple stringing together of lemon garlands for the goddess Durga, to dividing the prasadam or blessed foods for the children first, I came to associate food not only with feminity, but also with purity and divinity.”

— Padma Lakshmi

21. “Flowers die and wine gets consumed. Both are lovely. I appreciate both. Wine and roses. I actually had someone bring me a lobe of foie gras once.”

— Padma Lakshmi

22. “In southern Spain, they made me eat a bull’s testicles. They were really garlicky, which I don’t like. I prefer to take a bull by the horns, not by, um...”

— Padma Lakshmi

23. “I am as omnivorous as it’s possible to be. I always say there’s nothing I won’t eat and nothing I won’t wear.”

— Padma Lakshmi

24. “Beauty is no accomplishment on its own. It’s what you do with it.”

— Padma Lakshmi

25. “The best thing you can do for someone is make them a beautiful plate of food. How else can you invade someone’s body without actually touching them?”

— Padma Lakshmi

26. “Wine, like food, is so emotional. If you think about it, so much of the courting ritual is surrounded by wine and food. There’s a built-in romance to wine.”

— Padma Lakshmi

27. “Where is it written that a smart woman can’t also be stacked?”

— Padma Lakshmi

28. “I never Tweet about my daughter. Never. I just want to be respectful of her privacy. My job as a mom is to know when to open my mouth and when not to.”

— Padma Lakshmi

29. “I grew up a vegetarian. Then, because I grew up in the states, I started slowly eating meat. First it was bologna sandwiches, or pepperoni on pizza.”

— Padma Lakshmi

30. “I’m an immigrant kid who came to America from India when I was very young and grew up in New York City with a single mom and really was influenced by all of those immigrant cultures bumping up against each other.”

— Padma Lakshmi

31. “Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status.”

— Padma Lakshmi

32. “I’m the kind of girl who thinks about what she’s gonna cook for dinner when she’s finishing her lunch.”

— Padma Lakshmi

33. “You don’t want your jewelry to make you look fat. A lot of what’s out there now does – you just wind up looking like a Christmas tree.”

— Padma Lakshmi

34. “Every city has a Donald Trump; ours is just the Trumpiest.”

— Padma Lakshmi

35. “I work out all the time! I don’t just sit around and eat burgers whenever I want. Oh, if I could I probably would, but I don’t.”

— Padma Lakshmi

36. “I was the first Indian model to have a career in Paris, Milan and New York.”

— Padma Lakshmi

37. “People are thrown off by someone who looks feminine, but is also strong. It’s not that pretty girls aren’t smart, it’s that women aren’t strong.”

— Padma Lakshmi

38. “One thing that happens when you’re pregnant is that as your stomach starts to stretch. It itches! So I have to keep my belly really lubricated. Every morning, there’s a buttering ceremony after I get out of the shower. It’s really like basting a turkey with body butter.”

— Padma Lakshmi

39. “I’m not of the American ilk that, you know, your lover needs to be your best friend and know you inside out. I think he should know you well enough to please you. Otherwise, what secret will there be to tell him when you’re ninety?”

— Padma Lakshmi

40. “I have great empathy for all the contestants that come on ‘Top Chef,’ whether they go home right away or they make it to the finish line. It’s a very vulnerable position they put themselves in and I feel for them.”

— Padma Lakshmi

41. “I don’t have any stigma attached to my body. When I’m in my own private space, I have very little on.”

— Padma Lakshmi

42. “Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on ‘Top Chef,’ I feel, is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant, we want to make sure we tell them why it’s not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.”

— Padma Lakshmi

43. “Jewelry should not upstage you. I pick one hot point on my body that I’m going to highlight. Let one area do the singing – you don’t want to hear three songs at once.”

— Padma Lakshmi

44. “During the course of filming ‘Top Chef,’ I gain 15 lbs., so I’m used to needing two dress sizes.”

— Padma Lakshmi

45. “Maybe that old adage about not being able to have a good apartment, a good relationship, and a good job at the same time is true.”

— Padma Lakshmi

46. “I really like to sometimes go into food detox and eat very simply.”

— Padma Lakshmi

47. “I think a great classic watch is the first staple every woman should invest in.”

— Padma Lakshmi

48. “I always think, after the second glass of wine, you should be putting something in your stomach.”

— Padma Lakshmi

49. “But now I was home. In my home, home home, once and for all. I had had various apartments before in quite a few cities over the course of my life, but this was the first one I owned, and it felt good. A roof over my head and a place to be private, to cry, to laugh, to gorge, to hope, to dream, to wallow, and to pray for things was a salve to my soul.”

— Padma Lakshmi

50. “I always thought that what Rajima did with those cast-off peels was a metaphor for how she dealt with her arranged marriage. She transformed those peels, with palm sugar for sweetness and tamarind for tang, into something precious.”

— Padma Lakshmi