Amanda Harlech quotes:

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

I think the artistic process comes from disorder. When you are happy, it's not always a feeling that you can identify. It's like a dog sitting in front of a fire. Pain isolates you, but it can also clarify things.

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.

I don't think I am a proud person, but I think my children are incredible... I think I am part of that.

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

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

As women, we need to remember: don't be a doormat!

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.

People think of me as a stereotype: muse, privileged, decorative. Classically, the muses were the inspiration. They'd come and go - they wouldn't actually make things, get their hands dirty. I don't think I'm a muse, although I think I can help pull a trigger. I really like getting my hands dirty.

I do quite a lot of art, with a small 'a'. I guess that is how I was dredged up, with paints and crayons. Even when I was at nursery, I knew instinctively how to mix colours, how to make purple or orange.

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.

Style is anti-fashion; it's not about following trends,

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.

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.

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

I'm interested in stories. I think I'm a bit of a pathfinder.