God was fair to the Japanese. He gave them no oil, no coal, no diamonds, no gold, no natural resources — nothing! Nothing comes from the island that you can sustain a civilization on. What God gave the Japanese was a sense of style—maintained through the centuries through hard work and the disciplines of ambition.

Don't look left nor right and never compete. Never. Watching the other guy is what kills all forms of energy.

If you had a bump on your nose, it made no difference so long as you had a marvelous body & good carriage. You held your head high, & you were a beauty You knew how to water-ski, & how to take a jet plane fast in the morning, arrive anywhere, & be anyone when you got off.

If it isn't a passion, it isn't burning, it isn't on fire, you haven't lived.

Balenciaga often said that women did not have to be perfect or beautiful to wear his clothes. When they wore his clothes, they became beautiful.

You're not supposed to give people what they want, you're supposed to give them what they don't know that they want yet.

All my life I’ve pursued the perfect red. I can never get painters to mix it for me. It’s exactly as if I’d said, ‘I want rococo with a spot of Gothic in it and a bit of Buddhist temple’—they have no idea what I’m talking about. About the best red is to copy the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.