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

Everything I publish is for my readers.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm very proud of the fact that I'm one of Britain's biggest selling poets. That gives me a huge amount of pleasure.

Publishing magazines for yourself is not good business, man.

'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.

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

Native trees are so important to our ecosystem.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 write about whatever turns up. Every single day, I'm sitting down for three to five hours in the evenings wrestling away and producing far too much verse.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Posthumous reputations have little to do with real lives.