Top 70 Sophie Dahl Quotes

I’ve got to confess… I do feel slightly like I’ve been born in the wrong time.

When you meet someone who really sees you, it gives you the emotional freedom to pursue your dreams.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

I like good manners, old-fashioned courting, I like being wooed.

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.

My modeling career was really just a long accident – one that happened to coincide with my chocolate-cake phase.

When I began modelling I was completely unprepared for the onslaught of curiosity it carried with it.

I’m naturally greedy and would end up the size of a house if I ate all I wanted all of the time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is hard finding clothes that fit. At the German Vogue shoot most of the clothes were undone at the back.

I didn’t like being a model. It feels weird to stand in your knickers in front of people you aren’t married to.

When I was a child, I named my rabbit Pancake and my guinea pig Maple Syrup.

There is nothing better than a proper breakfast.

My cooking is incredibly haphazard, but I’ve never pretended it was anything else.

I was greedy and ate in that unselfconscious way teenagers do, constantly grazing and eating when I wasn’t hungry.

I certainly wouldn’t feel safe telling people I was writer.

I have no complaints about my childhood whatsoever.

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.

I eat very simple food, really. A lot of it tending towards nursery food.

When I was at school I wanted to be a writer and an actress. Then this whole modelling thing happened.

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.

A formative cookbook for me was Nigella Lawson’s ‘How to Eat.’ Its warm, conversational tone is wonderful.

It’s nice being married to someone who likes to read because you can indulge in geeky conversations about books.

I get asked about my weight endlessly. There is no story. It doesn’t merit so much talk.

I wish my grandparents were around to see my children.

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!

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.

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’d love to master another language properly.

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.

I was very lucky that I didn’t end up a basket case.

I’ve been watching a ton of Ali Wong on Netflix. I love everything she does – there’s a fearlessness about her.

I have become that middle-aged woman who listens to the ‘Hamilton’ soundtrack in my kitchen.

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.

When I modeled, my name always came with a preface: ‘the voluptuous Sophie Dahl.’ I was the anti-waif, as round as a Rubens.

I know part of nostalgia is romanticising the past, but I love doing things in a slower way, and the glamour of bygone eras.

I was an only child until I was six.

In my family, we were all rather plump as teenagers.

I absolutely didn’t think, ‘I am really fat, I must get thinner.’

I love sushi.

I am not ashamed to admit that I’m wearing Yves Saint Laurent from top to toe.

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.

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.

There’s no pressure on me to be a particular weight. But I loathe being renowned as a ‘larger’ model. It makes me cringe.

My mother Tessa married my stepfather, James, when I was three and we lived in Boston for a year.

If I had to become a food I would be a pineapple. Spiky, but quite sweet really.

I always had boyfriends, whether I was skinnier or rounder.

I think that if you really love a book, there’s nothing nicer than to have a first edition of it.

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’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do: being a mum, writing, living in the country, having a happy time.

On my raw food diet, my skin shone bright like a gilded deity and my eyes glowed in a somewhat unearthly manner.

I’ve spent a great deal of my life one way or another talking about food or eating food.

I don’t want to deride London because I have such a huge affection for it, but New York lets you move on and grow up.

I love anchovies in sauces, but on their own, they’re repellent: their lurid pink bodies spook me out.

Find me a first novel that doesn’t have parallels with the author’s life.

I go out to dinner occasionally and that’s the sum of my dating life.

I think it would be a bit miserable going out with somebody who was totally uninterested in food.

I’ve started running since I had kids, and I’ve become one of those annoying people who likes running.

My grandmother is really awful sometimes.

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.

I’ve started to read more factual books, partly because I didn’t go to university.

I’m a great believer in fairy tales. I think it is important to have something you can lose yourself in.

I come from a family of greedy food lovers.

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.