Quotes from Sophie Dahl

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

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

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

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.

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 should be allowed to be voluptuous or scrawny of my own volition, without people going on about it.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I have always been tall. When I was five, I towered above all the boys in my class, so it is something I have grown up with.

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.

I have no complaints about my childhood whatsoever.

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.

That's the whole thing about fashion: it's fantasy. To dip into that at 18 and 19 was amazing.

I have nothing against a good facelift.

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.

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