Vivienne Westwood

“There's nowhere else like London. Nothing at all, anywhere.”

“Buy less. Choose well. Make it last. Quality, not quantity. Everybody's buying far too many clothes.”

“I very rarely watch my own fashion shows, but the makeup for my Fall 2011 show was just brilliant.”

“The best night of my life was watching the Japanese Noh theater. I've only seen it once, but even saying it now, I think, 'How can I ever have this experience again?' It was so mesmerizing, so complicated and so primordial; I could not believe it.”

“The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.”

“Real art has been... what's the word? Kidnapped? No, that's not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.”

“I was the first person to have a punk rock hairstyle.”

“All that self-expression has just created a generation of morons, hooked on an endless appetite for rubbish.”

“The muscular, athletic type is not representative of the human race, who are varied in their physique.”

“The capitalist system is about taking from the Earth and from the other great commodity, labour. What's happening with this system is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the only way out of it is supposed to be growth. But growth is debt. It's going to make the situation worse.”

“My clothes are very popular in Japan.”

“The sexiest people are thinkers. Nobody's interested in somebody who's just vain with a hole in their head, talking about the latest thing - there is no latest thing. It's all rubbish.”

“We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.”

“Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I'm delighted.”

“I eat only vegetables and fruit, and to me it's the most aspirational diet because it's so easy. It's quite simple, the cooking I do.”

“I talk to fashion designers and say I want some money to save the rainforest, and they say, 'Oh, I agree with you completely Vivienne. Yes, climate change, it's definitely happening,' but they don't feel that they can do anything about it; they don't even think 'Well let's stop it!'”

“The French have got taste.”

“The reason why I am proud of my part in the punk movement is that I think it really did implant a message that was already there. The hippies told it to me, but punk made it something cool for people to stand up for, which is that we do not believe government, that we are against government.”

“It's a philosophy of life. A practice. If you do this, something will change, what will change is that you will change, your life will change, and if you can change you, you can perhaps change the world.”

“I don't follow politics much.”