NIGELLA LAWSON

'Statistically, people who have been happily married and then widowed tend to remarry.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

On the whole, I prefer Christmas as an adult than I did as a child.

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

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

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.

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

I don't believe in low-fat cooking.

I don't like conflict.

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.

You need a balance in life between dealing with what's going on inside and not being so absorbed in yourself that it takes over.