“I do speak Mandarin, and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.”

Let’s be realistic, how many people are buying a $2,000 skirt? I love to design things that people can actually buy. I’m staggered by what a boot costs today.

A bride should look at everything she possibly can…just so she can experiment and see what makes her really feel beautiful or glamorous or classical or whatever she desires to be on that particular day.

To me, eyewear goes way beyond being a prescription. It’s like makeup. It’s the most incredible accessory. The shape of a frame or the color of lenses can change your whole appearance.

When I decided to get married at 40, I couldn’t find a dress with the modernity or sophistication I wanted. That’s when I saw the opportunity for a wedding gown business.

I don’t live through my kids. But I do know what will happen in life, and I just want them well prepared.

When brides ask me, “What’s the best advice you can give me on my wedding day?” I always have the same answer: “Be yourself.” Someone’s marrying you, they love you for who you are, and they don’t want you to be someone else.

I’m not really a girl who likes to go out to lunch or cocktails or store openings.

My mother was extremely controlled, sort of flawless. And I always tend to be a bit more hippie.

In the end, it’s not about failure, it’s about how much you love what you do.

Success isn’t about the end result; it’s about what you learn along the way.

Ready-to-wear is what I’ve wanted to do since the beginning. I’m not a girl who spends my life in a ballgown

I’m only waiting for Lindsay Lohan’s fashion collection to come out. Ten years from now, there may be no real designers left.

It takes tremendous will to compete in any athletic endeavor, so it meant going to bed early and getting my homework done in advance. I had to sacrifice things, like a social life, to be a skater at 15. But I loved skating so much that it was worth everything to me.

Brides today are increasingly sensitive to the tastes, feelings and finances of their attendants.

I always see where I didn’t do things the right way. I only see the heavy lifting. That’s a bit of my wisdom, if you want to call it that.

I’ve always tried to push myself technically and to push myself visually. That’s been part of the journey.

I do not conceive of any manifestation of culture, of science, of art, as purposes in themselves. I think the purpose of science and culture is man.

You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you.

Geography is destiny.

Use your own reason to find the truth. And to do this, you must first get rid of the myths that your culture injected to your brain!

But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.

Twentieth-century culture’s disease is the inability to feel their reality.

Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.

The thing itself is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer’s Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.