If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through. So it's self-given, but that's the only way, I think, to make a strong, good new creation.

The more people that are afraid when they see new creation, the happier I am.

It would have more meaning for me to hear what critics have to say if their values and their ways of living were deeper and more serious.

Comme des Garcons is a gift to oneself, not something to appeal or to attract the opposite sex

For me, creation can only come out of a certain kind of unhappiness. They say in Japan, this thing like the hungry spirit - the hungry mind - is what gets you going forward.

The same spirit runs through everything I do.

My approach is simple. It is nothing other than what I am thinking at the time I make each piece of clothing, whether I think it is strong and beautiful. The result is something that other people decide.