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.

Let's talk about that for a moment, about the couple that Yves Saint Laurent and I were. Like all couples we went through "storms," as the Jacques Brel song says. But if there's one area where we never had the slightest disagreement, it was art. Never. Not once. Not about painting, not about opera, not about theater. We were always in complete communion. Of course, that's how all of the collection came into being.

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.

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.

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

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.