I'm not a pretty person. I don't like pretty, so I don't feel badly. Most of the world is not with me, but I don't care.
— Iris Apfel
I'm not a collector of clothes. I've got clothes to wear.
You can change the look of an outfit so easily by changing the kind of jewellery you wear. If you have a basic outfit on - a black sweater and skirt or a simple black dress - you can go from the office to a cocktail party at night just by changing your jewellery. It helps if you change your shoes as well.
Oh my God, I'm a walking advertisement for discounted shopping.
I hate being asked how I met my husband and very personal questions like that. I don't like that. People are too nosey. Intelligent questions I like, but sometimes people ask such silly, dopey ones.
You don't find out who you are unless you work at it.
Fashion and interior design are one and the same.
I absolutely consider fashion a form of art. Of course, there is some fashion that is not art at all - it's utilitarian, made for the purpose of covering up. And there are a lot of people out there who put a lot of effort into looking awful. But there are also people putting the same amount of energy into making bad art.
I don't happen to approve of plastic surgery. I think God put plastic surgeons on this earth for good reasons - people get burned or people might have a nose like Pinocchio and that has to be fixed. But to just chop yourself up to look a few years younger? You could come out looking like a Picasso picture.
You can be born with the talent to be an opera star, but you've got to work and practice it.
In my view, you can't go to the future if you haven't come from the past.
I'm not out to preach. I just live my own life. I'm very happy if I can help somebody - that's wonderful. But it's up to them what they want to think about it or what they want to take away; it's their business, not mine.
I wasn't interested at all in doing a documentary. I was not a public figure.
People with a lot of money don't dress as well as people who have to make do, who have to be inventive. Those are the people who are always more interestingly dressed, I think. Everything I do, I do with gut instinct. If I think too much, it won't come out right.
Clothes are not frippery. Properly done, they can be an art form.
My look is either very baroque or very Zen - everything in between makes me itch.
I'm a practical person. Most fashion people live in the clouds, and they're full of it. I live like a human being - or, I try to - and I have to be intelligent; I have to be practical. I'm a great believer in common sense, and the older I get, I see that common sense is not that common.
I didn't have children, but I never wanted children.
Great personal style is an extreme curiosity about yourself.
I've always loved to help people, young people in particular.
I'm happy. I give thanks every morning that I can get up, that I still have my husband with me. I'm extremely grateful. After all, how many 93-year-old cover girls do you know?
Fashion has this youth mania. But 70-year-old ladies don't have 18-year-old bodies, and 18-year-olds don't have a 70-year-old's dollars.
Self-exploration is very painful, but unless you do that, you will never know who you are and who you want to be.
Just because you get to a certain number doesn't mean you have to roll up into a ball and wait for the grim reaper. We were put on this earth to do something! If you stop using your brain, at any age, it is going to stop working. It's like if you stop using your hand, it will atrophy. I think doing nothing is a curse.
I call myself a geriatric starlet.
I love high-end designers, but a head-to-toe designer look for me is extremely boring. I've always mixed it up.
You learn as you grow up, if you're intelligent - or even three-quarter witted - that there's no free lunch. You pay for things in various ways. Living, loving, everything else is a matter of the same principles: you learn to work with what you have.
People say, 'You have inspired me, you've given me courage...' They've gone so far as to say, 'You've changed my life!' And I would come back and say to my husband, 'I can't understand it - what kind of poor little life did she have if I had to come and change it?'
I have ideas that I think might be amusing, and I try them, and if they look right, I carry them out, and if they don't, I throw them out and try something else. I don't agonize about it.
Nobody is original anymore. Nobody has any original style.
Fashion really is women's liberation in a lot of ways. Look at how many women in this country are depressed about how they look and how they think they have to look! It's really sad. And it's not about money.
Coco Chanel once said that what makes a woman look old is trying desperately to look young. Why should one be ashamed to be 84? Why do you have to say that you're 52? Nobody's going to believe you anyway, so why be such a fool? It's nice that you got to be so old. It's a blessing.
I'm a hopeless romantic. I buy things because I fall in love with them. I never buy anything just because it's valuable.
Technology is a wonderful thing, but I think it's violently misused.
Colour can raise the dead.
I swear on everything holy I do not know what's on the Internet about me.
Anything that's feathery-looking, I love.
I was always known in my industry, and I always enjoyed a modicum of popularity.
The fashion industry has done itself in by neglecting the 60- to 80-year-old market. They have the time and the economic resources. They want to go shopping.
I never buy what someone says is 'in' or a 'must-have.' I buy what makes me happy.
We did major work at the White House. But what people often don't understand is that when you do a historic restoration, you can't just do whatever you want. You work alongside the fine-arts commission and are obliged to create a replica of the past, as close as humanly possible. It's a historic institution, not a showhouse.
Being well-dressed is a wonderful thing, but I don't think it should be life threatening.
There's different shopping in Paris than there is at a bazaar in Istanbul, but they're all wonderful.
I was never a fan of Chanel. I liked it on other people. Some other people. All the ladies who were too plump and busty looked like little sausages.
I don't look at Instagram. I don't have much to do with social media.
The White House is the people's house. When you do historical restoration, that must be what it is.
I always tell people I'm very large in Uzbekistan.
Throughout history, clothes represented who you were; they are a great vehicle for explaining who you are. During the Ching dynasty, for example, what you wore and how it was made reflected your status in society. People could literally read your clothes like a book, just by its color and how it was embroidered.
When you don't dress like everybody else, you don't have to think like everybody else.
I've never seen anything like the way some young people behave. They go out on a date, and they're sitting opposite each other at a table, and they're not looking at each other, and they text each other as though they're deaf-mutes. It's insane.
