"I am brave, but I take a view. It is an educated view. I am careful. I am not reckless."
"I could have closed down bits of British Home Stores to make more money but it's not my style. I want to make my money as a retailer, not by putting people out of work."
"It's all about quality of life and finding a happy balance between work and friends and family."
"You've got to love what you do to really make things happen."
"I think I pick more winners than losers."
"I'm in the retail business, not the circus business."
"I don't like department stores. I had a chain of department stores back in 1994 which was Lewis's and Owen Owen, only for a short time, and I found department stores personally difficult."
"Good, bad or indifferent, if you are not investing in new technology, you are going to be left behind."
"You are forced to have the best data capture, the best information, when you have goods in hundreds of factories around the world, and the question is: 'Where is everything?' And how do you bring it all together?"
"They already know all about brands... but what 16- and 17-year-olds won't necessarily have is experience of the world of work. The more that businesses get involved with schools, the better, because businesses sometimes complain that students don't have what they require to succeed in work."
"People are always going to go shopping. A lot of our effort is just: 'How do we make the retail experience a great one?'"
"It's not my style to blame anybody else."
"I have a very clear conscience."
"If I say I'm going to do something, I do it."
"You're going to find England, unfortunately, is a place where you get a lot of jealous, envious, you know, negative people. That's how it is."
"I hope and believe all the people that worked very closely with me at BHS for all those years, and some for the whole journey, will know it was never my intention for the business to have the ending it did."
"There is no reason why government should not be as efficient as any good business."
"I wasn't a good school pupil. I was interested in business."
"I used to leave my house at 6:30 in the morning, and I would visit 10 shops every Saturday, starting at the furthest shop I'd decided to go to that day, ending up in Oxford Street 12 hours later."
"Arcadia was a typical venture capital deal, but I'm the adventurer and the capitalist."
"I don't regret anything I haven't done."
"Nobody can be a clairvoyant."
"On what possible basis would I want to stop someone from buying BHS if I had tried to save it?"
"It is about attention to detail and then the minutest detail on top of that. I am an owner, and yet I'll argue about the sign on the wall."
"If you go 90 yards in a hundred-yard race, you come last. Usain Bolt slows down for the last half a yard, but for 99 yards, he is that far ahead that he can. In our business, you can't be far enough ahead. It is such a competitive marketplace."
