"The principal themes of the [Heptaméron] are rape, seductions bordering on rape, incest and numerous infringements of the sex and marriage codes of aristocratic Europe."

"The first modern woman."

"I wait for death... and journalists."

"I took pleasure when I could... I acted clearly and morally and without regret. I'm very lucky."

"I see badly, I hear badly, and I feel bad, but everything's fine."

"I had to wait 110 years to become famous... I intend to enjoy it as long as possible."

"I have a rather masculine nature. I'm not afraid of anything."

"Every age has its happiness and troubles."

"I had a hell of a lot of will power! A hell of a will power, you understand? And it was very useful to me."

"I have got only one wrinkle, and I am sitting on it."

"I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it."

"England is very, very important to me, because in my family the English could do no wrong. When my father picked a mistress, it was always an English girl: if he made her pregnant, she could be shipped back to England and he would not be held responsible. It never happened, but I've made a lot of work called The English Can Do No Wrong."

"At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering – the father saying something, the mother choosing to defend herself. To escape the bickering, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers. With the dough of the French bread – sometimes it was still warm – I would make little figures. And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture."

"I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents."

"Art is a guaranty of sanity."

"Women had to work like slaves in the art world, but a lot of men got to the top through their charm. And it hurt them. To be young and pretty didn't help a woman in the art world, because the social scene, and the buying scene, was in the hands of women – women who had money. They wanted male artists who would come alone and be their charming guests. Rothko could be very charming. It was a court. And the artist buffoons came to the court to entertain, to charm. Now it has changed, now the younger men are in – older women and younger men."

"I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way."

"I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and repairs it."

"What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself."

"The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself."

"Youth is something very new: Twenty years ago no one mentioned it."

"In 1919 I woke up famous. I'd never guessed it. If I'd known I was famous, I'd have stolen away and wept. I was stupid. I was supposed to be intelligent. I was sensitive and very dumb."

"How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone."

"Fashion is made to become unfashionable."

"He will soon be claiming that the Resistance has liberated the world."

"There is nothing more comfortable than a caterpillar and nothing more made for love than a butterfly. We need dresses that crawl and dresses that fly. Fashion is at once a caterpillar and a butterfly, caterpillar by day, butterfly by night"

"Despite the work of a dozen biographers … Chanel remains an enigma."

"Throughout her long life, Chanel moved between two worlds, one real the other imaginary. Unloved, she lived for love. Despite her countless conquests, from English noblemen to Russian dukes, she spent years alone, work her only solace."

"Chanel, General De Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time."

"The best colour in the whole world is the one that looks good on you."

"A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous."

"I was a rebellious child, a rebellious lover, a rebellious couturière — a real devil."

"Ask me who I don't dress!"

"Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door."

"Fashion fades, only style remains the same."

"The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud."

"Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable."

"Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening."

"Women think of all colors except the absence of color. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony."

"As long as you know that most men are like children, you know everything."