When I was growing up in the Forties and Fifties, you could hide your children from the difficulties of life, but today you can't separate children's contact with the adult world today.

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

You get to about 65 or 70 and you lose friends and the world does seem to be an endlessly difficult place and tragic place, so it's more and more difficult for me to find the bright lights.

Books that kids read should be about what is going on in the world.

Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you.

What people are now realizing is that this formula that technology destroys jobs and creates jobs, even if it's basically true, it's too simplistic.

I was not thinking about the age of Internet when I was making the fall-winter 2012 collection.

You don't need a corporation or a marketing company to brand you now: you can do it yourself. You can establish who you are with a social media following.