Felix Dennis quotes:

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.

This modern mania for interfering in other's lives, usually under the guise of health and safety concerns, is highly irritating and counterproductive. Down with the nanny state.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nobody could like Donald Trump, surely, except his mother. No one really likes The Donald. But how can you not have respect for a guy who's been down on the floor and just keeps coming back? Nothing will keep Donald Trump down until they drive a wooden stake in his heart and a silver bullet in his brain.

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.

With the greatest of respect, I have watched Apple from the day it started. I was publishing magazines about the Apple II before most people had ever heard what a personal computer was.

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.

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.

Publishing magazines for yourself is not good business, man.

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.

What is negotiation but the accumulation of small lies leading to advantage?

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.

Unless you are completely retired, earning money is the best form of wealth preservation.

I love the business of business; I love the risk raking.

You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.

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.

The Week' is my favourite magazine. Everyone from presidents to CEOs of companies love it, politicians, people in the massive charity business in America, in the arts and even more especially in the media.

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?

When I was young, I wanted to be the greatest blues singer of all time. I wrecked my education and left home for it.

Making money is certainly the one addiction I cannot shake.

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

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.

You cannot be seeking yourself when you're making money.

For me, temptation is life and I have a gargantuan appetite for everything.

It's a long, slow sunset for ink-on-paper magazines, but sunsets can produce vast sums of money.

You'll never get rich by working for your boss.

I couldn't care less what anyone's 'perception' of me is. I'm too long in the tooth to care.

The reason I don't carry a mobile phone is I don't want people to know where I am!

I cannot abide being bored.

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.

I loathe and detest movies and television and don't watch any. I do not have the time.

I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'

Whatever qualities the rich may have, they can be acquired by anyone with the tenacity to become rich.

The belief that you have a great idea is not worth cuckoo spit. Ideas are ten a penny while the ability to execute counts for a great deal more.

I only buy a computer when it's two years old, after the glitches have been worked out.

Sometimes, to ensure that a talented individual will work for you, or will stay working with you, you need to be flexible. Money is not always the great motivator here. Talented people want a good salary, of course, but surprisingly often they are more attracted to new opportunities and challenges.

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.

Rich people always have a certain degree of debt. Apparently it helps to reduce taxes. I'm not so hot on the bean-counting side.

Discourse has ended in America. It's all just shouting and ranting and demonization. Do you know how the rest of the world laughs at you guys? Have you got any idea? They're just rocking with laughter night and day.

I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.

The age of celebrity editors and monstrous staffing are over.

I'm an entrepreneur, a businessman. I've got a lot of money, and that doesn't go very well with the whole 'starving artist in a garret' routine.

The key to successful business is self belief and application.

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.

Fear not. For fear itself is fed by fear, and all fears pass. Did no one tell you so? Come take my hand, my friend, and we will peer into this fear's abyss. And jump! And know.

Posthumous reputations have little to do with real lives.

People who get trapped in the tunnel vision of making money think that is all there is to life.

There are far too many people in university in Britain. If you want to make money, be a plumber.

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.

Money is power. Power is an aphrodisiac.

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.

The beginnings of a forest is one of the ugliest things on the planet. It's bleak and your neighbours hate you.

You shouldn't go around the world behaving ruthlessly when you don't have to. Sometimes you do have to. There is only so much pie to go around. If you're going to take more than your fair share of pie, as socialists would look at it, then someone else is not getting his. That means you've got to take it away from them.

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.

I have been portrayed by actors in three television documentaries, two plays, one musical and a film. It's no fun watching yourself being traduced and imitated by an actor.

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.

You have to persuade yourself that you absolutely don't care what happens. If you don't care, you've won. I absolutely promise you, in every serious negotiation, the man or woman who doesn't care is going to win.

With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?

Native trees are so important to our ecosystem.

I think having a great idea is vastly overrated. I know it sounds kind of crazy and counterintuitive. I don't think it matters what the idea is, almost. You need great execution.

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.

The planet doesn't require saving, and actually hasn't asked Greenpeace to save it.

Obviously, waste disposal is an enormous and fantastic industry.

Anyone not busy learning is busy dying.

Without self belief nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible.

The bottom line is that if I did it, you can do it. I got rich without the benefit of a college education or a penny of capital but making many errors along the way. I went from being a pauper.. a hippie dropout on the dole, living in a crummy room without the proverbial pot to piss in, without even the money to pay the rent, without a clue as to what to do next.. to being rich..

For a start, the salary begins to have an attraction and addictiveness all of its own. A regular paycheck and crack cocaine have that in common. In addition, and more to the point, working too long for other people can blunt your desire to take risks. This last factor is crucial, because the ability to live with and embrace risk is what sets apart the financial winners and losers in the world.

Say to yourself: The world is full of money. Some of it has my name on it. All I have to do is collect it.

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.

Money is color-blind, race-blind, sex-blind, degree-blind, and couldn't care less who brought you up or in what circumstances.

Most of the worst errors I made in my life came from forgetting to act small.

Teamwork is the glue which binds losers together

Ideas don't make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.

When you come across real talent, it is sometimes worth allowing them to create the structure in which they choose to labor. In nine cases out of ten, by inviting them to take responsibility and control for a new venture, you will motivate them to do great things.

Poetry forces a writer to condense and crystallise his thoughts and often represents a short cut to truths unsuspected by the author himself.

I have an over-attachment to precision, which is why I've sold more magazines than any man alive.

You have an advantage that neither education nor upbringing can buy - you have almost nothing. And therefore you have almost nothing to lose.

There are as many forms of happiness as sorrow, though most prove fleeting.

It's kind of a crazy thing to decide that you're going to be worth tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars and set out to do that. It doesn't suit everybody.

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.

Do not be shy to call customers who owe you money. It works.

People who grow rich almost always improve their sex life. More people want to have sex with them. That's just the way human beings work. Money is power. Power is an aphrodisiac. Money did not make me happy. But it definitely improved my sex life.

Everything I publish is for my readers.

Talent is indispensable, although it is 'always' replaceable. Just remember the simple rules concerning talent: Identify It, Hire It, Nurture It, Reward It, Protect It. And when the time comes, Fire It.

Few things in life are certain except death and being taxed.

If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly and even catastrophically, you will never be rich.

Whosoever plants a tree / Winks at immortality,

If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it.. it's cheaper in the long run.

False praise is worse than no praise.

Having a great idea is simply not enough. The eventual goal is vastly more important than any idea. It is how ideas are implemented that counts in the long run

I have one talent, and that's figuring out what people want about two minutes before they know it themselves.

You can actually be bored stiff while you're dying.

I never sue journalists. I employ journalists. I employ too many of them. I don't sue journalists.

'The Week' is my favourite magazine. Everyone from presidents to CEOs of companies love it, politicians, people in the massive charity business in America, in the arts and even more especially in the media.

'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.

Knowing isn't doing; doing isn't knowing. Nothing but the knowing and the doing gets it done.

If the influence of luck is a delusion, then all I can say is that the delusion is virtually universal.

America is not the center of the universe.

Believing your own bullshit is always a perilous activity, but never more fatal than for the owner of a start-up venture.

Human beings are definitely changing the planet, but how much impact they are having on climate, I don't know and I don't care.

America, ladies and gentlemen, has done more for me financially than Britain ever has, or ever could have done.

It's very difficult to be continuously charitable in a capitalistic society. You've also got to make sure that you can pay everyone who works for you.