Andy Warhol, by his friends

'Everyone wanted to please him. He had that thing of saying, "Astonish me." He wanted to be amazed. But in a funny way, nothing amazed him. People went as far as they could to astonish him but Andy would just say, "Oh, that's great." They'd never get a reaction. He wasn't very easy to draw out. He's the most private public person I've ever known.

'I remember, years ago, I was having lunch with him and it was snowing when we came out of the restaurant and there were lots of nuns shovelling snow off their car. Which looked quite funny - the black and white in the streets of New York, the black nuns and the white snow. Andy levelled his camera at them, which he always carried, and the nuns saw him and they were screaming, "No, don't photograph us." And he put it down rather shamefacedly and he said, "Gee, if I were a nun, I'd love to be photographed."'

Boy George

'I was in New York and I got a phone call from Andy's office inviting me to dinner. I was nervous about going, and his assistant said, "Would you like to invite anyone?" So I said, "I'd love to meet Quentin Crisp and I'll bring Marilyn." So there was Bianca Jagger and Holzer and Marilyn, and Quentin Crisp. Quentin Crisp was the life and soul of the lunch. Thank God he was there, because Andy was never a great conversationalist. He just said, "Great. Oh, great, everything's great."

'In his diaries, he was very rude about me. He said, "I went to see Boy George at Madison Square Garden, he's so fat." Which was a bit of a cheek. Another entry said, "Boy George and Marilyn pick on me because they know I can't answer back." One evening we all went out for dinner with Jean-Michel Basquiat and, because it was a small table, a couple of our friends had to sit on another table. One of them was a bit upset about it so he kept flicking chips in Andy's hair, and he kept removing them and pretending it wasn't happening.

'He was an interesting character, but I always felt it was the court of King Andy. If you wanted to be close to him, you had to pay him homage. He just had a weird personality. Whenever you met him he would say, "You guys look great, can I take a picture?" I don't remember ever having any particularly enlightening conversations with him. He wasn't a particularly emotional person. A lot of that was to do with the fact that he'd been shot. So he was quite scared in public. He was almost terrified that someone was going to attack him at any moment.'

Ben Volpeliere Pierrot

'We did a video with Andy Warhol, which was surreal. We met him at his exhibition in London. He hadn't shown in London for 20 years and we started talking to him, and that night he invited us to a big art banquet he was having at Caf? Royal for 500 people. We turned up in our jeans and everything.

'Afterwards, he wanted to hear a tape and the next week we were out in New York shooting the video and he was in it.

'He was very quiet and weird and very astute and experienced. He just observed a lot. He used to stand in a corner. There was a cardboard cut-out in a studio in New York of him on the balcony and you couldn't tell them apart. But he was very sweet and unfortunately he died six months after we shot the video.'

John Cale

'Andy showed up at a party for Jackie Kennedy that the group and I were playing. There was Secret Service everywhere and he had his entourage. That was my first taste of that paparazzi style he was happy with. He'd take groups of a dozen people with him everywhere. There was something going on all the time and everyone around him behaved like court jesters. All of this was on a blatantly and enthusiastically pointless level.

'He protected us in a way. He made sure that our instincts about our songs were there all the time. Sometimes we'd be off in 24 different directions at once, and when we'd lose focus on something, he'd remind us of it. He knew that Lou [Reed] was happiest when given tasks to do. He said, "Here's 14 titles, write me 14 different songs on these titles." And Lou loved that challenge.

'He was always very precise. I'd never go to him just to have a conversation. Because he'd be having conversations with five different people at the same time. The only reason to talk to him was to solve a problem. And it was a pleasure to watch. It was always so easy for him to benignly solve something that was intractable before. There was a certain amount of magic about that.

'We did a show in Providence and Andy gave a TV interview. And instead of standing, he lay down on the floor. There was a glass ball on the ceiling that sprayed the whole room with flecks of light and the guy wanted to know why Andy was lying on the floor and Andy said, "I can see all the stars." The guy was not ready for Andy's na?vet?. And that incredulity really worked for him all the time.'

Jeff Koons

'I met Andy at Studio 54 and also in an elevator at The Factory. They were superficial conversations but we got along great. My friend Sue Atkin worked for Andy and she introduced us, saying to me, "You'd like his work," and mentioned a certain exhibition of his. Andy said, "Ooh, that's nice."

'I recently saw his exhibition in Berlin and it's fantastic [the exhibition arrives at Tate Modern on Thursday]. I really could get a sense of enjoyment of how Andy loved repetition. The freedom that it gave him. In a way, he was able to be godlike, he was able to play God. He could reproduce and reproduce endlessly. And also treating abstraction as death. From an image that's reproduced perfectly to an image that's blurred, just aspects of death. He was role-playing God. One work that I liked was the painting of knives. It was hung in Berlin, between a pistol and a skull and sickle and this knife painting had such clarity. It's so beautifully done and so cleanly done. Just seeing this exhibition, I was able to have a fresh look at Andy.'

Malcolm McLaren

'I was staying with Vivienne Westwood at the Chelsea Hotel in 1972, and Andy Warhol, Bob Colacello, Patti D'Arbanville, Alice Cooper and the New York Dolls came to a party we had. After that, I saw Andy in my shop on the King's Road with a group of friends buying T-shirts. One was of a naked black man who had this big wonga hanging down. He loved that. I'd started working with the Sex Pistols and he adored the name. I met him again in Paris and he started to study me. I became a specimen. From head to toe. The shoes. What you were wearing. He looked at people in this way. As case studies. As objects. As characters in his world.

'You never knew him because he never revealed very much. He was mostly silent. He was unwilling to comment. I went to parties in New York in the early Eighties and would say, "Andy, this is really boring." He'd say, "This is wonderful." I don't recall him ever saying anything else. Everything was wonderful. He made you feel foolish. What was he seeing that I couldn't see? Why was it fabulous?

'There was something immensely dark about Andy Warhol. Death and mortality seemed to hang around him. He made you feel that life literally was a photograph. I could never get a sense of him. You only got a picture of him. He didn't look anything different than he looked in the pictures. If you saw a photograph of Andy Warhol, you knew him. I don't think he had any sex. Standing next to him, you just didn't sense that. He might have been scared of sex. He might have been scared of life. Because life was something he could only see through these rose-coloured spectacles.'

Warhol is at Tate Modern from 7 February to 1 April (020 7887 8008; www.tate.org.uk).
Handy Andy Comes to Town