I decided when I was 19 that I didn't like all these stereotypes that I was supposed to fit into. I wasn't comfortable and they made me very unhappy. So I tried and I spent a miserable summer, and then I went back to school and said, 'I'm going to do my own thing because I think I have a thing to do. I'm not going to live in anybody else's image because I don't like that.' I felt much better. I didn't do it to rebel against anybody or anything.

I think fashion today is horrible. Just open your eyes and look! What's good about it? There's no originality. Here and there, there is, but in general, en masse, there's very little creativity and very little originality. It's kind of boring. Everybody looks alike. Everybody seems to strive to look alike.

When you don't dress like everybody else, you don't have to think like everybody else.

If you can't be pretty, you have to learn to make yourself attractive. I found that all the pretty girls I went to high school with came to middle age as frumps, because they just got by with their pretty faces, so they never developed anything. They never learned how to be interesting. But if you are bereft of certain things, you have to make up for them in certain ways. Don't you think?

I'm delighted that gay people now want to get married and I say why not! It's nobody's business and I would happily give my blessing.

My mother gave me very good advice years ago. I grew up in the Great Depression and she always told me to get a good little basic black dress - well-cut, well-made, good fabric - and it could take me through everything. I could go to the office in the morning and stay out all day in the same dress. Just by changing accessories, because they are so transformative, you can make six different outfits. I find that very useful. My mother worshipped at the altar of accessories and I'm an accessory freak, as everybody knows. That, I got from my mother.

My mother worshipped at the alter of accessories and I got the bug. She always said, if you have a good, little, simple black dress and you have different accessories, you can have 27 different outfits.