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.

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.

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.

Everything I publish is for my readers.

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

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

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.

The age of celebrity editors and monstrous staffing are over.

I cannot abide being bored.

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?

The climate has been changing since there was a climate.

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.

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

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.

America is not the center of the universe.

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

The best thing about being immensely wealthy is not having to be in any particular place at any particular time doing a particular task you don't want to do.

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.

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

The problem with rich lists is... it is impossible to know what someone is worth until they have died and you have sold it.

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.

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'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.

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.