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.

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 met Andy Warhol in the '60s, a wonderful time, with wonderful people. There was Fred Hughes, and Jed Johnson, who I liked a lot. Jed Johnson decorated my apartment in New York, at the Pierre. It was his first job.

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.

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.

Love is what makes me live, quite simply. It's the only thing that makes me work. It made me become what I am today.