I mean, the shoe - there is a music to it, there is attitude, there is sound, it's a movement. Clothes - it's a different story. There are a million things I'd rather do before designing clothes: directing, landscaping.

There are few plants that are ugly. It's how you use them that may not be pretty.

Sometimes women feel uncomfortable when men stare at them when they try on shoes.

The shiny red color of the soles has no function other than to identify to the public that they are mine. I selected the color because it is engaging, flirtatious, memorable, and the color of passion.

People ask me all the time, 'How can I walk in these heels?' I answer with the best compliment I remember that came from a woman who lives here in Paris...I know my street much better. Heels permit me to take the time to look at the architecture of my street. Now I take time to look at things.' High heels give you time to think, to look at your surroundings- a camel has seen more in life than a very quick horse! Women should live to rhythm of high-heeled shoes!

I'd already decided I wanted to design shoes after I saw a sign in the Museum of African and Oceanic Art forbidding high heels. Well, who could resist?

My father, who was a cabinetmaker, told me, 'Wood has a grain and if you go into the grain, you have beauty. If you go against it, you have splinters - it breaks.' And I took that as my view of life. You have to follow the grain - to be sensitive to the direction of life.