Chairman Mao not only introduced Pinyin in China, but also simplified half the Chinese characters, believing that fewer strokes would enable more people to learn to write the characters.
The three most dreaded words in the English language are 'negative cash flow'.
There is no point mucking around and saying we are just going to have one or two shops and that's it... we are going to reach, you know, 40 shops around the world. I want 150 shops in China.
The image we have of a famous person often bears no relation to them.
Entrepreneurs should never work with big corporations.
I've always wanted to go to Timbuktu. First of all I think it has the best name of anywhere in the world.
Twitter is very impulsive and impermanent and you only have 140 characters. There is no greater 'Emperor' of Twitter than Stephen Fry.
In cyberspace, 95 per cent of what you read is hearsay.
If you are a friend of somebody and that friend is in trouble, you don't just drop them.
I can't establish the veracity of what people say because only they know whether they are telling the truth. I can't look into your mind, can I?
It was something of a personal challenge for me to come up with a business suitable for the Internet world and the Internet age.
I'm not terribly technological. I'm awfully backward about iPads and BlackBerries and suchlike; I still have a great fondness for Teletext, and I clung onto my fax machine for as long as I could, but eventually you have to move with the times.
About 90 percent of what's out there in cyberspace is hearsay - or lies - and opinion, often misinformed opinion, and it's all repeated over and over again.
The beauty of the Internet is that there's no space limit.
Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese.
Stephen Fry is a master exponent of the English tongue. Some people might think that he is the most irritating man in Britain, but my wife and I love him all the same.
I'm extraordinarily lucky to have so many friends across such a diverse group of people. One day I'll be at Oxford, the next at some complete idiot's lunch.
I shout at people... I am told that I'm a tyrant, but I still get things done, so that is fine.
The crux of the matter was... the partnership between Richemont and myself was going sour for personal reasons, and you know, you can't have two people arguing all the time, so it was either my buying him out or him buying me out.
I didn't like law. Every client had a problem, and I didn't want to listen to people's problems; I had enough of my own.
