“I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.”

Don’t wear what you question, wear what you think is right for you.

I get along with everyone except for men my age, who are bourgeois or retired or boring.

The brain is a muscle, and I’m a kind of body-builder.

Its all about taste.If you are cheap, nothing helps

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.

I do my job like I breathe — so if I can’t breathe I’m in trouble.

I don’t want to do anything over again, ever again. I want only to do what I haven’t done. There’s no “again.” There’s only the future. I hate the past – especially my own past.

Guilty feelings about clothes are totally unnecessary. A lot of people earn their living by making clothes, so you should never feel bad.

I never fall in love.

I’m never content with what I do. I live in a sort of permanent dissatisfaction. I think that’s the secret to doing things well.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly. Fashion is about dreams and illusions, and no one wants to see round women.

Personality begins where comparison ends.

Work is making a living out of being bored.

I never drink anything hot; I don’t like hot drinks, very strange.

If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.

In terms of language, English is very dominant vis-Ã-vis African language. That in itself is a power relationship – between languages and communities – because the English language is a determinant of the ladder to achievement.

And even in terms of justice, law codes, the legal system. A person who does not know English in Africa is excluded from that system because he can only operate through acts of translation.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

Never let the estate decrease in your hands. It is only by such resolutions as that that English noblemen and English gentlemen can preserve their country. I cannot bear to see property changing hands.

My dad was an English professor.

What is translated from English and into English – and in what quantities – is a question of power.