I carried on buying paintings, works of art, and Yves Saint Laurent, if I may say so, had a right of inspection. We even shared a common reading of the history of art. It would never have crossed Yves's mind to say to me, "Ah, I saw a Pablo Picasso . . ." He knew perfectly well what was interesting with Picasso, as did I.

You don't own art. What does that mean? We are trustees of art. Art is in transit with us. That is why an auction is a wonderful thing. You clap your hands and the objects fly away like doves and find other places where they will be protected, loved. That's what I believe.

At the age of 9, I read David Copperfield by Dickens. At 14, I read War and Peace by Tolstoy. They're both books I have reread regularly since.

I've already bought another house in Tangier and the one in Deauville has been for sale for some time. As for Yves's Saint Laurent apartment, it is being sold because he's dead. But I won't be furnishing my home from Ikea.

I am a man who has spent more than half a century ostensibly and visibly accompanying Yves Saint Laurent throughout his life - but not only that. In the past and still today, I have been behind a lot of creators and artists, supporting them and helping them. That's probably how I see my mission.

I had a Vincent van Gogh, a small Provençal landscape. We sold it. If you're going to have a van Gogh it should be a really good van Gogh.

You don't spend every day saying, "Gosh! That's so beautiful." Sometimes you look at an object more attentively and see it anew. I won't talk of any one object in particular. For me there is no hierarchy in art. Things have an inherent quality or they don't.