“All I want are high heels, high heels. If I was a girl, I'd wear a lot of high heels. High, stiletto heels.”

“Either it works or it doesn't.”

“Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America.”

“Everyone asks, Will he make it, will she make it? You never make it.”

“Half the time I don't even think about it, I just throw something on because I'm so late or so busy.”

“How do I do it? I don't know how I wouldn't do it - that's the thing.”

“I don't want to offend people.”

“I have a lot of obligations.”

“If I just do it, it will take less time than telling someone what I'm thinking, and have them free associate, and then come back to me and I'll hate it and I'll have to redo it.”

“If you try to have a fashion show with Bach fugues and John Coltrane, it doesn't really work.”

“I'm so involved in melancholy.”

“In Paris, it used to feel like you were living in a museum. As beautiful as it was, it's still limited. But here you have just everything.”

“Just when I think I hate fashion, I hate clothes, I'm seized by this crazy thing that I have to do. I have this little studio now where I just draw. I can be in the room for three days and not even look up.”

“Most of my life I was occupied with American television and American food. My ethnicity was my choice. It still is.”

“People say it's really the press who create those soundbites about fashion. That's what sells magazines and clothes.”

“Sometimes I'm really dressed up, and it really turns me on.”

“That's one thing about fashion that you really shouldn't be-you can't be melancholy in fashion because people don't respond to it.”

“The reason people like to watch ball games is because they don't really know exactly what's going to happen from moment to moment. That's why you watch the entire thing.”

“This is what I like about being a designer: You can't really get it until you see it.”

“What you do, you don't think of as a product.”

“When people ask, Do you like children? I always say, I like some children, yes. Some children I don't like.”

“When someone says you can't do what you know you can do, then you can't do anything.”

“You don't necessarily live for the moment; you live for hope-what you're going to get, what you're going to say, what you're going to think.”

“You know what makes me teary? Goya. Goya makes me cry.”

“You know who a role model for me is? George Ballanchine.”

“You listen to Handel operas, right? And there are a thousand of them, right? And they all sound alike. If I look back on my work, maybe it's the same thing.”