Amanda Harlech

Writing is something I should have done more of, it's a form of coming home.

We have to keep an eye on the future with a sense of the past in every passing moment of the present.

I think fashion, mishandled, can be quite toxic. It becomes about image and the cult of celebrity. I think when an artist is seen at a lot of parties as a celebrity, I find that worrying. I think it can limit them.

I think the most destructive thing is fear: when people don't want to say what they think.

I didn't want to get divorced, but at the point where your children are part of it, you have to do something. I would really love it not to have happened because it haunts you, it will never go away, and it is probably the biggest failure, and I have to live with that.

Couture has a power that ready-to-wear can never have; the attention of les petites mains as they sew; all that love and belief goes into the cloth. That's what you feel when you wear it.

At home, I love reaching out into that absolute silence, when you can hear the owl or the wind.

Contemporary culture is like the weather - we have to be open to it. I don't like the way it is dismissed or closed down.

I think I am really easygoing. Well... as I was about halfway through that sentence, I thought, 'No, actually you're really picky.' But the things I ask for are really simple to do.

Our idea of happiness, some of it, is very tied to the cult of celebrity: there is this golden, wonderful life that I want, and if I dress like that, I'm on my way there.

I am not good wife material because I'm fiercely independent and like to go off and do my own thing.

My earliest childhood memory is watching the sunlight through a jar of amber full of wasps.