Top 26 Raf Quotes & Sayings

I tried to join the RAF cadets at school so I could fly a plane but then I realised you had to do all the other cadet stuff like training before they let you in a plane. Then you're roped in for life.

As a journalist, I cannot help imagining with excitement a new era with a face-off between Hedi Slimane at YSL and Raf Simons at Dior - a magnificent battle of style and wills to echo the Armani/Versace, Gucci/Prada or even Chanel/Schiaparelli face-offs of earlier years. But I remind myself that this is not a game of chess.

On one occasion, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and myself were due to appear at the Sarajevo film festival and were turned off a UN plane on orders from Geneva. We had to get local journalists to transport the films in for us. I tell you this only to demonstrate that festivals can be a lifeline. But, after all the difficulties I'd had in getting there, in 1996 I found myself being flown in on a four-seater RAF plane as an official guest, endorsed by the British Embassy. Ironically, the film I was to present was Mission: Impossible.

I got into boxing for two reasons. One was that my father was a boxer. Secondly when I was young, all healthy men in the UK had to do two years "National Service" in one of the armed forces. I chose the Royal Air Force over the Army and Navy. My father's reputation went before me and therefore the RAF encouraged me to box. There is much rivalry in sporting competitions between the Army, Navy and RAF. Competing has great privileges. I didn't need too much encouragement with all these perks being offered, so I started training with a vengeance.

My mother was a stay-at-home mum and my father was an RAF pilot.

I met Richard Burton, an RAF cadet on a two-term course. I would have flirted more enthusiastically if it had not been for the horrid boils on the back of his neck.

I spent my earliest years in Colwyn Bay in north Wales with my mother and grandmother, while my father was stationed with the RAF in India.

I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertaker's assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

My dad was in the RAF, so we travelled quite a lot. My memory's not the best - I remember we lived in Belgium for a bit - but I grew up in a village called Compton in Newbury.

I've never seen Ralph Lauren, Rick Owens, or Raf Simons described as white designers. They are just designers.

I had that morning gone to say my farewells to Broadhurst and to the RAF. I had made a point of going to HQ at Schleswig in my 'Grand Charles.' Coming back I had taken him high up in the cloudless summer sky, for it was only there that I could fittingly take my leave. Together we climbed for the last time straight towards the sun. We looped once, perhaps twice, we lovingly did a few slow, meticulous rolls, so that I could take away in my finger-tips the vibration of his supple, docile wings.

It would be nice to be a professional pilot. I'm an amateur pilot at the moment. I've got a lot of friends in the RAF and I don't think I've ever met a group of people who love their job as much as they do.

Before Michael Caine you had to have been in the RAF to be an actor.

My mother was quite poorly. She suffered from bipolar disorder, which at that time was called manic depression. She spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals, and my father was away a lot with the RAF and then with his job in civil aviation, so I was raised in part by my sisters and my godmother, Sylvia.

I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertakers assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

My first feature film was a movie called 'A Gunfight,' with Kirk Douglas, Johnny Cash, Karen Black, Jane Alexander, Raf Vallone... It was shot in Santa Fe, Mexico, in 1970, and it was directed by Lamont Johnson. It was the first gig I did when I got to California from having done 'Hair' in New York on Broadway for a year. It was a Western, though! But that film was not a successful release.

My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.

It was the rootlessness that went with being the son of an RAF officer that shaped me. I had been to 11 schools by the time I was 9.

Acting was never part of the plan - at one point I wanted to be an RAF pilot, but I wasnt made of the right stuff.

I remember one time I went to Craigslist to find something; that's how bad I wanted it. It was a pair of Raf Simons - this was like 2010. But Raf said he was going to make them for me.

At LVMH, we have amazing heritage brands, and we put interesting talents in those brands, sometimes very young, like we did at Givenchy with Riccardo Tisci at the time, or like we just did with J.W. Anderson at Loewe, but also talents that are already further along in their careers, like Raf Simons at Christian Dior or Nicolas at Vuitton.

I thought I'd join the RAF and become a wing commander. I realised this wasn't possible, although I do have a pilot's licence.

The RAF allowed me to play a lot of football, but like England later, they failed to recognise real talent when it was under their noses.

Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.

I don't find it difficult anymore, because these days, Raf is only men and Dior is only women. I found it much more complicated when I was doing Jil Sander for men and women. It wasn't that it was the same, but I'm specific about where I want to go, and when you suddenly have to do two men's collections in the same moment, that was more difficult.

My father, who was a sergeant in the RAF during the Second World War, was killed in a hitchhiking accident while returning home on compassionate leave. As a result, my mother had to get work, as a nurse, and at seven the RAF put me into a boarding school and ex-orphanage called the Royal Wolverhampton School.