We build our character as a carapace to keep away the fear of the abyss. That's what our character is for.

I can count all the lovers I've had on one hand...if I'm holding a calculator.

I have wanted only one thing to make me happy. That thing is everything.

Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn't, he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere-much more Calvinistic, more neurotic - it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.

I don't really know what Americans are like. I've no idea. I know a few things about them. In my imagination, they have warm peachy hearts, whereas the English have horrible spiteful withered hearts - success in England inspires envy - in America, it inspires hope.

I am half-Byronic, half-moronic; part-shaman, part-showman; half-Nazi, half-Liberace.

I keep the shutters closed because I like to work in a hermetic environment. I like mirrors. When you look out of the window, all you see is ugliness, but when you look in the mirror all you see is beauty.