There's nothing that really motivates me anymore and demands that I get up in the morning. In the past it was Yves Saint Laurent.

I'm not an ascetic and please don't use the word zen, which is so lightly bandied about these days. Being zen . . . It's shameful to talk in such a way. I haven't become an ascetic but I'm not going to build up another collection. I'm going to create my new environment. I already know what I want.

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.

A collection is like a dinner party. It is made up of the people you invite, but also the people you don't.

There was an exchange between me and Andy Warhol. We met, we liked each other, we appreciated each other. He would come to us for Easter in Marrakech. In September we would meet up in Venice. And every time I went to New York I would spend some time with him at the Factory, where we would have dinner together. He's a man that I admired deeply. He shook up the notion of painting - not as much as Marcel Duchamp had done, but he was part of the same general movement. And then we both admired art deco.

When journalists come to interview me, it's a part of my life that is exhibited, as if pieces of clothing are being taken off one by one. But it's not very important really.

The problem with Yves Saint Laurent was that he was a man who understood his time period better than anyone, but he didn't like it. Real artists live their own lives in parallel. It's the artist who transforms his times.