“One is never over-dressed or underdressed with a Little Black Dress.”

My hair is not really white; it’s kind of grayish, and I don’t like the color. So I make it totally white with Klorane dry shampoo. That is the best thing to do because my hair is always clean.

If you stick to something doggedly, you are off to a bad start.

I think that it’s a crime to say you are bored when time is so precious and there are so many things to do in life: read, learn, watch.

Normal people think I’m insane.

Fashion is the healthiest motivation for losing weight.

You cannot fake chic but you can be chic and fake fur

I hate birthdays, .. It’s more like a new starting point in New York. For me, it’s an evolution. I don’t celebrate the past. I like the present and tomorrow.

I’m open to everything. When you start to criticize the times you live in, your time is over.

Dress for yourself and the man you love (if there is one). Women dressing to impress other women–forget about that. Forget about that. It’s a very bad way of thinking.

Youthfulness is about how you live not when you were born.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said – and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded – ‘It’s like hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It’s not a subject.’ This was a very healthy attitude.

Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.

What I hate is nasty, ugly people.

What I’ve done, Coco Chanel would never have done. She would have hated it.

I like everything to be washable, myself included.

You come first, the clothes later. Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Be creative.

I like to describe my life as a black hole with a little light out there.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

To be beautiful, woman enough to have a black sweater, black skirt and walk arm in arm with the man she loves.

Chanel is composed of only a few elements, white camellias, quilted bags and Austrian doorman’s jackets, pearls, chains, shoes with black toes. I use these elements like notes to play with.

We’re all Africans, everyone – black, white, yellow.

We all tend to be in the same circles – people like my Wu-Tang brothers, or Black Thought from The Roots.

Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.

But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.