Quotes from Alexander McQueen

I hate it when people romanticize Scotland.

It's good to know where you come from. It makes you what you are today. It's DNA, it's in your blood.

I can't get sucked into that celebrity thing, because I think it's just crass.

I don't want to be too proud, but I have a good personal style.

There is something sinister, something quite biographical about what I do - but that part is for me. It's my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance, melancholy. There's a sadness to it, but there's romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person.

Rap music's been around for too long now to be inspirational. The words are, but the music isn't.

There is no better designer than nature.

Menswear is about subtlety. It's about good style and good taste.

I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil.

Of course I make mistakes. I'm human. If I didn't make mistakes, I'd never learn. You can only go forward by making mistakes.

There is something sinister, something quite biographical about what I do - but that part is for me. It's my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance, melancholy. There's a sadness to it, but there's romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person.

I always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of 12.

Now I design what I want to wear, and it works that way.

I can design a collection in a day and I always do, cause I've always got a load of Italians on my back, moaning that it's late.

I work with people I admire and respect. It's never because of who they are.

I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era. I think of people I want to dress when I design.

I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists.

Rap music's been around for too long now to be inspirational. The words are, but the music isn't.

You find a lot of ideas from my shows in adverts now. I find it a compliment.

I think the idea of mixing luxury and mass-market fashion is very modern, very now - no one wears head-to-toe designer anymore.

The police need to come down to street level.

I used flowers because they die. My mood was darkly romantic at the time.

People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don't see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.

I think there is beauty in everything. What 'normal' people would perceive as ugly, I can usually see something of beauty in it.