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.

I never abandoned Yves Saint Laurent. I used to have lunch with him twice a week. I also saw him every Saturday. My presence beside him was even more important in his bad times. But that didn't leave me a great deal of room in which to maneuver. Freedom is an intellectual space. But I don't use it.

There's nothing that really motivates me anymore and demands that I get up in the morning. In the past it was Yves Saint Laurent.

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

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.

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.

When journalists come to interview me, it's a part of my life that is exhibited, as if pieces of clothing are being taken off one by one. But it's not very important really.

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.

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 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.

Chanel liberated women: Saint Laurent gave them power.

I won't make a mark on history. I have some importance in the time we live in, but that's all.

You don't own art. What does that mean? We are trustees of art. Art is in transit with us. That is why an auction is a wonderful thing. You clap your hands and the objects fly away like doves and find other places where they will be protected, loved. That's what I believe.

I hate sentiment when it's inappropriate. I saw someone who went and saw an exhibition and came out in tears. If an exhibition drives you to tears you need to see a psychiatrist immediately. That's what I think.

Loving dogs is a question of anthropomorphism. We become attached to dogs because of the feelings we project on them.

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.