Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Writing is very different to having your photo taken. You are exposing yourself more, not physically but emotionally.
I can't eat at all when I get sad; all I want is soup and easy-to-swallow baby food and, of all things, jelly babies.
To my detriment I'm quite rosy-visioned about the idea of love. It's slightly embarrassing but it's part of who I am.
There's no pressure on me to be a particular weight. But I loathe being renowned as a 'larger' model. It makes me cringe.
Central heating is my vice - I have it on a bit too much as I am always cold. I try to make up for it in other green ways.
I know part of nostalgia is romanticising the past, but I love doing things in a slower way, and the glamour of bygone eras.
When I modeled, my name always came with a preface: 'the voluptuous Sophie Dahl.' I was the anti-waif, as round as a Rubens.
My size wasn't something that I'd ever spent a huge amount of time thinking about - I guess at the age of 17 or 18 you don't.
It really was total heaven to be a writer. As a model or actor you are employed on someone's whim. As a writer, you are in control.
Fashion should be about making clothes that make all women look beautiful, not making women starve so that they can fit in a size 8.
I don't feel any pressure to live up to the legacy of my grandfather; if I did, I'd be mad. I'm as much of a fan of his work as anyone.
I lived on an ashram in India at 12 and later I was a heroine in a Bollywood movie - I'm not telling you the name because I was terrible.
None of the sample sizes ever fit me at the photo shoots. One would think that would've made me want to lose weight, but I just got rounder.
My family is as complicated as the next family. We have our joys and our tragedies, and we bear both with a black humour that is in our genes.
Feminism is so pertinent - it affects all of us. As a woman you have an instinct to question sexual politics, we have a responsibility to care.
Because I cook a lot, I wanted to write a recipe book, really incorporating the message that you don't have to starve yourself to be reasonably skinny.
So much for the myth that motherhood is all Laura Ashley smocks and skipping through fields. People think it's rose-tinted and they don't tell the truth!
The most evocative food smell is American seaside food - tuna melts and cookie dough ice cream, or the British version, fish and chips and toffee apples.
I grew up with my grandfather, so I knew him really, really well. He was funny and opinionated and wonderful. He was fascinated by things and always curious.
I like routine, and cooking became a ritual when I was modelling in New York. My life was nomadic, so making supper felt like an announcement that I was home.
I think everyone goes through a phase of longing to be little - I always wanted to be a girl who could sit on a man's lap, but that is just not going to happen.
My siblings and I had a loving but very chaotic and muddled childhood, and as a result we have sought out lives that are consistent and stable, domestic and happy.
I think with girls you have a real responsibility in terms of how you discuss the physical. Talking about your looks or body in a derogatory way doesn't do them any favours.
How I view my body hasn't been uncomplicated, but that was because my body was discussed and dissected at great length in a very public forum, when I was at a formative age.
Some people get fat when they're miserable; certainly this was true of my teenage self, but as an adult, deliver me a week of extreme stress and misery and watch me disappear.
My mother tells this joke about how when I was little I used to say, 'Mummy, all I want is a stable home!' and she'd reply, 'That's all right, darling, we'll buy you a stable.'
At 18 I wanted to study art history in Florence. I think I just fancied myself as Sophia Loren, wearing a foxy dress and walking through a market with a basket bursting full of figs.
My childhood was such an odd one, but with such magic, and the quirky grown-ups who were in it managed to still bring a huge sense of love and magic, so for that I'm really grateful.
Modelling is a bit baffling when you're 18. I just thought, 'Brilliant - I get paid lots of money to walk down a runway.' I didn't think I was signing up to be a poster girl for anything.
It's so easy to fetishise the dead. We rose-tint or villainise them, and so often in the retelling they are saints or sinners, rather than flawed humans muddling along like the rest of us.
I'm sure there were people who were disappointed that I got slimmer, but as one gets older one does often get a bit thinner. There was no great mystery: I had some puppy fat and I lost it.
When I write about things, it's a lot to do with sense memory. How things smell and taste can bring incredible memories flooding back and transport you in an instant to another time and place.
I remember being home alone when I was about 13 and making a souffle from a recipe in one of my mother's old cookbooks. I approached it in a very unafraid way, and produced a rather beautiful one.
I still don't know what the 'ideal' woman is. Waifs will always be in demand because it's a lot easier to design for straight up and down rather than round curves. This is the reality, unfortunately.
It was a really lucky childhood and while, yeah, there were bits of darkness, which is known about because my mother has made no bones about her struggle with depression, the overriding memory of it is a very happy, good one.
The problem with life is, we often do things that will ultimately be self-destructive and make us unhappy, yet in that moment it seems like the best idea in the world. You have to be careful of moments - they're tricksy things.
My younger sister, Clover arrived three days before my seventh birthday and I wanted to sell her. I'd had my mother, stepfather, and nanny Maureen, all to myself, and suddenly there was this bonny baby with green grass eyes that everyone adored.
My mother, all of her sisters and my siblings all went through a stage from the age of about 15 to 19 where they widened and then lengthened. Had I not been modelling, that would have been a phase that was in a family photo album rather than in Vogue.