Felix Dennis quotes

“A 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.”

“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.”

“America is not the center of the universe.”

“Anyone not busy learning is busy dying.”

“Ask me what I will give you if you could wave a magic wand and give me my youth back. The answer would be everything I own and everything I will ever own.”

“Be bold. Be brave. Don't thank your lucky stars. The stars can't hear you.”

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

“Develop a passion outside of making money. Fast. If I had made the time earlier to discover that I could write poetry that thousands of people would be kind enough to purchase and enjoy, I would have saved myself many torments of the pit.”

“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.”

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

“Don’t do anything because you feel you have to. Go for what attracts you. Go for something that exploits your natural talents. Go to the mountain which produces money. Money that has your name on it.”

“Enjoy the business of making money. The loot is only a marker. Time cannot be recaptured. There is no amount of pie in the world worth being miserable for, day after day. If you find you dislike what you are doing, then sell up and change your life. Self-imposed misery is a kind of madness. The cure is to get out.”

“False praise is worse than no praise.”

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

“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 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.”

“I cannot abide being bored.”

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

“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?”

“I have been very poor and I am now very rich. I am an optimist by nature. And I have the ability to write poetry and create the forest I am busy planting. Am I happy? No. Or, at least, only occasionally, when I am walking in the woods alone, or deeply ensconced in composing a difficult piece of verse, or sitting quietly with old friends over a bottle of wine. Or feeding a stray cat… I could do all those things without wealth.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.”

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

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

“If you haven’t much skill, or much wit, or much talent, or much luck, and yet you insist on owning more than your fair share of any start-up or acquisition, then you can become rich. If you take what you’re given, you will probably not get rich.”

“If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Seek them out and make them work. They do not have to be your ideas. Execution is all in this regard.”

“If you wish to be rich, you must grow a carapace. A mental armor. Not so thick as to blind you to well-constructed criticism and advice, especially from those you trust. Nor so thick as to cut you off from friends and family. But thick enough to shrug off the inevitable sniggering and malicious mockery that will follow your inevitable failures, not to mention the poorly hidden envy that will accompany your eventual success. Few things in life are certain except death and being taxed. But sniggering and mockery prior to any attempt to better yourself financially, followed by envy later, or gloating during your initial failures—these are three certainties in life. It hurts. It’s mindless. And it doesn’t mean anything. But it will happen. Be prepared to shrug it off.”

“In all negotiations of difficulty, a man may not look to sow and reap at once; but must prepare business, and so ripen it by degrees.”

“It is not that pearls fetch a high price because men have dived for them. On the contrary, men dive for them because they fetch a high price.”

“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.”

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

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

“Money is power. Power is an aphrodisiac.”

“Native trees are so important to our ecosystem.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One thing is for sure, you must avoid the trap of going into what you think will make you money if you have no empathy or feeling for what you are about to do. There’s no future in 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 start-ups are wrecked by overstaffing than by any other cause, bar failure to monitor cash flow.”

“Ownership isn’t the important thing. If you want to be rich, it’s the only thing.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sell early. Real money rarely comes from horsing around running an asset-laden business if you are an entrepreneur. You are not a manager, remember? You are trying to get rich. Whenever the chance comes to sell an asset at the top of its value, do so. Things do not keep increasing in value for ever. Get out while the going is good and move on to the next venture. More money is usually lost holding onto an asset than is made waiting for the zenith of its value. I should know – it’s my own biggest defect.”

“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.”

“Stupid people are easy to hire.”

“Teamwork is the glue which binds losers together.”

“The ability to sell is usually nothing more than a talent for hype and keeping a straight face as you demand a fifty times markup from potential buyers who wouldn’t know a Damien Hirst from a pickled sardine.”

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

“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.”

“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...”

“The key to successful business is self belief and application.”

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

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

“There are many clever, cunning and adept people who are risk averse. You are not risk averse because you are dedicated to becoming rich.”

“Time is the only thing we cannot replace, apart from our health and our lives. I resent wasting a moment of it.”

“To become rich you must be an owner. And you must try to own it all. You must strive with every fibre of your being, while recognising the idiocy of your behaviour, to own and retain control of as near to 100 per cent of any company as you can. If that is not possible, in a public company, for example, then you must be prepared to make yourself hated by those around you who are also trying to be rich. That is the dirty, rotten little secret of it all, my friend.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Whosoever plants a tree winks at immortality.”

“Why would clever, cunning and adept people work for a mug like you? Simple. There are many clever, cunning and adept people who are risk averse. You are not risk averse because you are dedicated to becoming rich. Believe it or not, much, much cleverer people than you will come and work for you if you ask them.”

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

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

“You do not need to be clever. You do not even need to be that adept. You need only a little cunning and massive determination to become rich. Providing you can pay much cleverer but risk-averse people properly, and promote them and lead them in such a way that they are all rowing in the same direction, they will sign on to your little ship.”

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

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

“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.”

“You’ll never get rich by working for your boss.”