Posthumous reputations have little to do with real lives.
— Felix Dennis
I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.
The problem with rich lists is... it is impossible to know what someone is worth until they have died and you have sold it.
Money is power. Power is an aphrodisiac.
Unless you are completely retired, earning money is the best form of wealth preservation.
You can collect all the plastic bottle caps you want as long as you give me the money so we can get off this death trap, find somewhere else and have tremendous fun screwing that up as well.
Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.
When you're writing, you're in a totally different zone... I can start a difficult poem and look up at the clock and see to my astonishment that three hours have passed.
In the end, the railroads made America and nanotech will make the 21st century, and that is the end of the story. The beginning of the story and the end of the story.
America is not the center of the universe.
I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'
Overhead will eat you alive if not constantly viewed as a parasite to be exterminated. Never mind the bleating of those you employ. Hold out until mutiny is imminent before employing even a single additional member of staff. More startups are wrecked by overstaffing than by any other cause, bar failure to monitor cash flow.
The rich are not a contented tribe. The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, so insistent, they often decide they must insulate themselves. Insulation eventually breeds a mild form of paranoia.
There are jobs, particularly database-oriented ones, for which computers are necessary, but for everyday office life, I question whether they have brought the productivity that their enormous cost, up to £10,000 per person, demands.
I thoroughly object to getting old. If you could let me be 16 again, I'd give you everything I've got and everything I'll ever have.
When I was young, I wanted to be the greatest blues singer of all time. I wrecked my education and left home for it.
For me, temptation is life and I have a gargantuan appetite for everything.
What is negotiation but the accumulation of small lies leading to advantage?
You can actually be bored stiff while you're dying.
I've always noted with some awe the reading habits of the Australian public. Australians read more newspapers and magazines per head of population than almost any other country in the world.
You cannot properly bring up children when you are 69 or 70 and they are 12 and at the height of their madness. You can physically do it, but I don't think it's morally justified.
I don't take investment advice from wealth managers. I have grown several businesses from scratch and amassed many millions from my publishing empire - why would I take advice from someone who has never experienced that?
The climate has been changing since there was a climate.
When I see something that's wrong, I just speak and act first and I'll take the consequences later.
America is an empire. I hope you know that now. All empires, by definition, are bumbling, shambolic, bullying, bureaucratic affairs, as certain of the rightness of their cause in infancy, as they are corrupted by power in their dotage.
Obviously, waste disposal is an enormous and fantastic industry.
No woman or girl is going to want to spend time looking at pretty dresses on the Internet. Vogue is going to be around for a long time to come.
The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.
There is never a time in a company's history when cost control can be relegated to the back burner, but for a startup company, keeping costs low is a vital necessity.
The richer you are and the more financial advisers you employ, the less likelihood there is that you can ever discover what you are really worth.
I only buy a computer when it's two years old, after the glitches have been worked out.
The beginnings of a forest is one of the ugliest things on the planet. It's bleak and your neighbours hate you.
I am a born-again atheist, so there isn't going to be a funeral. I will be buried in a linen wrap in a cardboard coffin in my forest with an oak tree planted on my head.
People think I'm just an old Luddite, but that's untrue. I buy every new gizmo as it comes out, play with it until I understand how it works, and then give it away.
False praise is worse than no praise.
I should have liked to get married, but over many decades I have lived essentially alone. I go to sleep when I'm tired, get up when I wake up, have my food prepared when I'm hungry. I can't bear the thought that I'd have to coincide, make an effort.
People really do not have time to read all the newspapers in the world and all the sites that we now commonly use on the web. There is no possibility of keeping up.
Everything I publish is for my readers.
I have one talent, and that's figuring out what people want about two minutes before they know it themselves.
The planet doesn't require saving, and actually hasn't asked Greenpeace to save it.
I've been busy for years, buying land, often under pseudonyms, and planting trees on it. All the money is going into it when I die - and in the end I'd like to think that it will be 20 to 30,000 acres.
America, ladies and gentlemen, has done more for me financially than Britain ever has, or ever could have done.
'Great Expectations' has been described as 'Dickens's harshest indictment of society.' Which it is. After all, it's about money. About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money.
Good ideas are like Nike sports shoes. They may facilitate success for an athlete who possesses them, but on their own they are nothing but an overpriced pair of sneakers. Sports shoes don't win races. Athletes do.
Very, very few entrepreneurs who accept a 51 percent partner in a new venture will get rich if they are also expected to run it. Control is mandatory.
As with the onset of sudden celebrity, for the newly rich, the world often becomes a darker, narrower, less generous place; a paradox that elicits scant sympathy, but is nonetheless true.
Computers are wasteful of paper and time. Once, we'd get documents with a few errors. Now, people make hundreds of copies until each sheet is flawless and memos are duplicated endlessly. Managers get swamped with emails.
I never sue journalists. I employ journalists. I employ too many of them. I don't sue journalists.
The best thing about being immensely wealthy is not having to be in any particular place at any particular time doing a particular task you don't want to do.
I loathe and detest movies and television and don't watch any. I do not have the time.
