Quotes By Padma Lakshmi

I think eating in itself is the act of great sensuality, so all you have to do is point the camera in the right direction.

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.

I've always had a fantasy to write a cookbook, because everyone wants to know what a model eats.

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.

For a while, I became an atheist; now that I'm grown up, though, I'm not hard-edged enough to be an atheist. Even though I live with a flaming atheist, I love going to temple. I love all the rituals.

For a long time, I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was desperate to find something that fit me and I just decided that if I could organically make a professional living out of the things that interested me, then I would be a happy person.

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.

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.

All chefs are like Jewish mothers. They want to feed you and feed you and impress you. It's an eagerness to please.

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.

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.

I love clothes, but really I don't have that much to say about skirts. Before I was writing, I went to fashion shows only when the designer was a good friend and I was there to show support.

Every country I would go to, even if it was just on a modeling job, I would go to their markets. If I went to Morocco for 'Elle' magazine, I would be in the spice markets during my off time and just come back with a suitcase full of stuff that I really wanted to try.

I like me better naked. I don't mean that in a vain way... When you put clothes on, you immediately put a character on. Clothes are adjectives, they are indicators. When you don't have any clothes on, it's just you, raw, and you can't hide.

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.

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.

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

I think wine is such a big universe that it's kind of like food - it's intimidating to a lot of people, myself included.

I've been a model for 15 years, and I've been on 'Top Chef' for eight seasons, and before that I had other cooking shows, so I've learned a thing or two about how to camouflage certain areas and how to draw the eye to a preferable area of the body.

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.

My first taste memory is pickle. Even as a kid, I was really weird. I liked chillis. I used to climb up the shelves in my grandmother's pantry. The pickle jar was kept right at the top. One time, I dropped the jar and it broke. I was totally busted.

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

I wasn't like those girls who give birth and are back on the runway. It took me probably six months to gain 45 pounds and I would say it took me double that time to lose it.

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.

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.

I tend to sleep in the nude... I'm a sensual-leaning woman. You have to use the word 'leaning' or it sounds like I'm boasting.

It doesn't matter how precisely the onion is cut as long as the person chewing it is happy.

The cookbooks and the writing in general have been a real bonus, but it's not something I've ever pursued... I've been lucky, I guess.

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.

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.