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.

Yves Saint Laurent hated fashion. He loved style.

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.

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.

On my own account I certainly wouldn't have become the director of a couture house. I didn't have sufficient admiration for fashion as such to have done so.

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 love Marcel Proust, but I leave him to his nostalgia. I don't approach art the way most people do. I don't get into Proust by imagining that I am Charlus or whoever. It's the same thing in painting - I try to look at it objectively. There's no pathos in that. It's like Bach's "Goldberg Variations." They have to be approached with a scalpel.