“I don’t wear a lot of color. In fact, I don’t actually like color on myself. I love color but it’s very challenging, it’s very powerful, it can overpower you. I think if my eyes were closed and someone put a red jacket on me, I would be able to feel that it was red. I don’t feel great in color.”

I am not someone who likes cocktail parties or large dinner parties, but I have to attend them often. I much prefer very small dinners with close friends.

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.

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.

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.

I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.

We must all learn a good lesson – how to live together. That is the new challenge of the new world, learning to co-exist and not co-annihilate.

Leadership cannot just go along to get along. Leadership must meet the moral challenge of the day.

Enjoy your time in public service. It may well be one of the most interesting and challenging times of your life.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.

Violence won’t solve a thing. It makes it more challenging to solve, though.

It’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions, it makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That’s America. So the challenge for us is, are we ready for change?