“Fashion is everything. Art, music, furniture design, graphic design, hair, makeup, architecture, the way cars look – all those things go together to make a moment in time, and that’s what excites me.”

If I was ever going to become a good designer, I had to leave America. My own culture was inhibiting me. Too much style in America is tacky. It’s looked down upon to be too stylish. Europeans, however, appreciate style.

I’m a believer in fate and in fulfilling your destiny. I’ve always had a kind of inner voice that I have learned to listen to.

I don’t believe in playing around much with suit cuts. I like a fairly classic shape that gives a man strong shoulders, a fitted waist, and long legs. Classic simplicity always works.

I’m a natural-born boss, I have to say. I just like to be good at things. Even as a child, I was boss of my family.

You can’t fake anything. If you’re honest and true and you love something, and you put that energy into it, people can usually feel it on the other side.

As a fashion designer, I was always aware that I was not an artist, because I was creating something that was made to be sold, marketed, used, and ultimately discarded.

If I had been a dog walker, I would have been the most successful dog walker in Paris.

If my parents had discouraged me, I would have turned out very differently. They raised me in an open-minded, liberal environment.

People always ask me how I start a collection, and I tell them that I just look around. What am I tired of? What am I in the mood for? Real fashion change comes from real changes in real life. Everything else is just decoration.

She needs to have a few drinks and cry a little-then she’ll be perfect.

I think people who are attracted to the fashion industry are people who are really insecure and looking for a certain identity.

You have to look inside yourself and you have to say, well, what am I about? Why does anyone need this? Why does anyone need a ‘Tom Ford’ jacket? What do I believe in?

You have to love what you do to the point that you can’t imagine doing anything else with your life.

France? I don’t want to be anti-French but there isn’t a more unattractive group of people on the streets.

Dressing well is a form of good manners.

I think that they haven’t been able to perfect a good facelift for a man.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art– Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite.

So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Skating alone is an art. Doing it on a substance? I don’t know. That’s got to be tough.

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.