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.

I'd love to talk to Joaquin Phoenix because he's a very private guy. Also, he's creating a new kind of sexy leading man. To me, his face is new and might be legendary someday.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I don't want to offend people.

You're not working with models, you're working with real women who have, like, anatomy. Models do not have anatomy.

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

I have a lot of obligations.

What if Woody Allen called me and said, I'm working on this movie and there's a really divine role for you. We want exactly you! It would be such a fantasy. Forget it! My idol, Woody Allen!

Mick Jagger, his face was very new. It became a sex symbol.

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.

I'm not trying to be the next Joan Rivers.

I don't like people to feel completely described by the clothes they wear of mine. I want them to feel that they're describing themselves.

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

I'd love to talk to Angelina Jolie. On my show I would love her because she's a mysterious, mysterious figure.

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

Either it works or it doesn't.

The more relaxed you can get, the better you'll do.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I'm so involved in melancholy.

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

The last thing I want to become is one of those talking heads where everything is satiny smooth and you know what the next question is going to be.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Being a fashion designers its almost like being a doctor. You can touch a person because they cough and you can tell whether theyre ill.

You cant be melancholy in fashion because people dont respond to it.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

The tender heart, the broken and contrite spirit, are to me far above all the joys that I could ever hope for in this vale of tears.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

Infuse your life with action. Don't wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen... yourself, right now, right down here on Earth.

Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way.

I don't sit in the corner waiting for death: death has to pursue me. I'm going strong. I hope to reach 100 and ask for an extension, just like my grandmother did.

When I talk to people in need, they tell me they want to hope; they are eager for opportunity; they are ready for better days. And I can tell you that every time their hopes are disappointed, all nations lose.