Artist

Dandyism is a lie which reveals the truth, and the truth is that we are what we pretend to be.

I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say 'pass the mustard'.

If I want to dislike women, I should be allowed to. As it happens, I love them. Women to me are privately worshipped and publicly disdained.

I like to remind myself that every morning I'm making a choice to live.

I think you are born, and I think you die. I have a pragmatic nature, but I yearn to believe.

You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things, all a man's endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach.

My grandfather was a practising Quaker. My father was a nihilist. But nihilism, if you like, is the beginning of faith anyway.

People who have a reputation for being evil are usually good.

I used to have about a hundred suits in my late twenties and early thirties when my stock was riding high and I was rich.

I live my life like an open book, even though it's open on the wrong page.

Think of how many boring, blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretion of me.

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.

The problem with compassion is that it is not photogenic.

I regret everything. But so what? At least I have cause.

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more.

A woman is supposed to have curves like an old Bentley, not like some old bike.

The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent. This makes me ecstatic.

I consider myself to be very correct and proper: an upright citizen.

If someone thinks I'm posh, it just shows how lowly they are. Some people think I went to Eton. I'm far too stupid to get into Eton.

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.