M.I.A.: No. My fashion icon is Colonel [Muammar al-] Gaddafi, and he always has been. He’s rock ’n’ roll.

GAVRAS: Yeah, he’s the best-dressed man on the planet.

Interviewer: When I was in Tripoli, a slogan caught me, "Wherever you go, Happiness rains..." Do you think 40 years after the revolution, Libyan people are happy?
Gaddafi: First of all, I have not seen those slogans and I am not responsible for them. Unlike you, I cannot freely taking time to read slogans if I am in the street, it's in the middle of convoy, so I have no knowledge of these slogans. But if that's the case the people who thought up that slogans acted with good intentions, they think well of this government and that glads me. I've done my best to make my people happy and free.

As you know Gallas had an unbelievable holiday. I hope he enjoyed it very much in Guadeloupe, which I think is a fantastic place to be on holiday, so he wanted to stay there for a long time."[On William Gallas missing the first team's trip to the United States because he was on holiday.]

I think he was greeted when he arrived at the hotel in Brazil by a topless model and a guy dressed as Donald Duck.

I dealt with Gaddafi. I rented him a piece of land. He paid me more for one night than the land was worth for two years, and then I didn't let him use the land. That's what we should be doing. I don't want to use the word 'screwed,' but I screwed him. That's what we should be doing.

When people think of what it's like to be famous, they think of the Ritz. But I've been in hotels where I will not take my shoes off. I will wear flip-flops in the shower. I've seen more basements of venues than I've seen of the United States. People think, Oh, you travel, you get to see the country. I've seen basements, I've seen concrete, I've seen pillars.

GAVRAS: So let’s talk a little bit about being a fashion icon. Do you think, for example, that Saddam Hussein was a fashion icon?

Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his "ranch" in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man.

There’s no problem mixing style with socialism - Fidel Castro was stylish!"

Interviewer:In an interview with ABC six years ago, you said the United States has made Osama bin Laden a prophet and a saint in the Islamic world. Is he still held that way, do you think?
Gaddafi: We should not have given him this value or this status. Who is he, bin Laden?
Interviewer: He committed a heinous act.
Gaddafi: Bin Laden made this heinous act.
Interviewer:You don't think what Osama bin Laden did was wrong?
Gaddafi:Was he on board one of the aircraft that hit the tower?
'Interviewer:No, but he took credit for sending them.
Gaddafi:This is another thing. I don't think that in front of us we have a court sentence vis-a-vis bin Laden or this or that.

Interviewer: How about al Qaeda?
Gaddafi: Where is al Qaeda? Al Qaeda's in Europe. Al Qaeda is here in New York.

For years, whenever I saw Mubarak, he reminded me of a mummy. He spent a considerable time each day to “prepare” himself. That meant dying his hair and eyebrows jet black, and applying rouge to his cheeks to make them look rosy, in more or less the same way Egyptian mummy makers did with dead pharaohs. He also wore heels to look taller and used a corset to keep his belly in. Despite declining eyesight, he shunned glasses in public. Even in his 80s, he wanted to appear alive and young, just as pharaohs had done. Mubarak’s attempts at securing eternal youth were faintly comical and ultimately harmless. What was not comical and certainly harmless was the mummification of his regime.

Feisal asked me if I would wear Arab clothes like his own while in the camp. I should find it better for my own part, since it was a comfortable dress in which to live Arab-fashion as we must do. Besides, the tribesmen would then understand how to take me. The only wearers of khaki in their experience had been Turkish officers, before whom they took up an instinctive defence. If I wore Meccan clothes, they would behave to me as though I were really one of the leaders; and I might slip in and out of Feisal's tent without making a sensation which he had to explain away each time to strangers. I agreed at once, very gladly; for army uniform was abominable when camel-riding or when sitting about on the ground; and the Arab things, which I had learned to manage before the war, were cleaner and more decent in the desert.