Quotes By Padma Lakshmi

During the course of filming 'Top Chef,' I gain 15 lbs., so I'm used to needing two dress sizes.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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'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.

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

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

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.

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.

Where is it written that a smart woman can't also be stacked?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

My mom was scared of the old Times Square so I was never allowed to go. Now I'm scared of the new Times Square, so I still never go.

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

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 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.