Quotes from Astrid Kirchherr

After Stu, I liked John and George. Then I like Pete Best. Paul I found hard to get close to.

When I met the Beatles, they were wearing these funny little leather jackets, which inspired me. I had a suit made for myself out of fine, good black leather. It looked different. I was using leather but putting a different fashion angle on how it looked.

I've hardly taken a photograph since 1967.

I didn't take that many pictures of The Beatles, but I did photograph them before anybody else knew about them, and that makes me proud. I saw something in them.

I'm not a businesswoman... I never looked after my negatives and you need that to prove you took the photographs.

I like to choose the people I take photographs of, but when you make your living off it, you've got to take everybody.

Well, the first time I met The Beatles was through my former boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, who saw them one night when he was wandering around Hamburg and then he heard this beautiful sound of rock 'n' roll music.

It is a serious job being a portrait photographer, which is how I saw myself.

For me, they are still my dear friends, not the Beatles.

Black and white means photography to me. It's much easier to take a good color photograph, but you can get more drama into a black and white one.

From the first time I saw them, I knew they weren't just five dirty little boys from Liverpool without an education.

You expressed yourself by looking different from other people. We even looked different from each other. But among the Exis, there was a close group of us, Klaus Voormann, Jurgen Wollmer and me. Klaus and I always wore black.

For me, the music of the Beatles then was serious and very, very serious art. So I couldn't take a picture of John laughing his head off or pulling funny faces because he was a serious artist, even when he was only 20.

I always thought Stuart deserved a little bit of fame. He was a gifted artist and a very wonderful person.

When Stuart passed away, I was so young and so selfish about living and having fun.

I'm a very, very silly girl.

I was initially attracted to John when I first went to see them play. Then I got to know Stuart because he was John's best friend. Our hearts took over from there.

And I was very, very much influenced by the films of Jean Cocteau and by Sartre and everything that came out of France because it was closer than America or England.

They are my friends. If they are the Beatles or the kings of China, it doesn't matter lo me.

You couldn't buy any English authors or anything that came from America, like jeans. It was impossible. So we had to do our own clothes if we had weird ideas like wearing long scarves like the French people did. You had to knit them yourself.

I have never met a man who I could still say, 'That is the love of my life.' Stuart is. I never met anybody as full of love and giving as this young man.

The most important thing I gave the Beatles was my friendship. They trusted me: there was no fear in being photographed.

We knew of Sartre and we dressed like the French existentialists. Our philosophy then, and remember we were only little kids, was more in following their looks than their thoughts. We were going around looking moody.

Stuart was a very special person and he was miles ahead of everybody. You know as far as intelligent and artistic feelings are concerned, he was miles ahead. So I learned a lot from him and because in the '60s we had a very strange attitude towards being young, towards sex, towards everything.