Nigella Lawson

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

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

“Emotion is messy, contradictory... and true.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The modern world is personal; people want to know intimate things.”

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

“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'm not someone who's endlessly patient and wonderful.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”