David Geffen

I thought Laura’s record was going to be huge… It was not successful it sold something like 20 or 30,000 albums. Laura lacked a certain level of ambition and didn’t really want to do the things that people do to become known. So I thought I’d better get people to record these songs and make them hits so that people will see that she’s a great songwriter.

[On his mother] She certainly ran her own race… I thought my mother was nuts.

[On his first job in the mailroom of William Morris a casting agency] It was the first time in the my life that I thought ‘I can do that.’

[On leaving Brooklyn] I left the day I graduated high school.

The opportunity for an entrepreneur to start a company from scratch today is abysmal.

You can’t interview my brother!… We can call this thing off – right now!

The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

Salesmanship is limitless. Our very living is selling. We are all salespeople.

I have a theory that the best advertisements come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.

I don’t know the rules of grammar. If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.

No serious-minded man should have time for the mediocre in any phase of his living.

I really don’t retain information – by the time I arrive wherever I’m going, I already forget what it is that I wanted to say.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

A low wage business is always insecure.

Our aim is to compete with any luxury brand. Candy & Candy will be a luxury brand, recognised in Rodeo Drive, New York, Dubai, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and London. Those are the major centres in the world. It will be synonymous with the design of homes, houses, flats, yachts, aircraft and retail.

You don’t learn to walk by following rules, you learn by doing and by falling over.

Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.

The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.

Every man must decide for himself whether he shall master his world or be mastered by it.

The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up.

There has never been a time when a career in the Penney Company was not a challenge that brought out the best in a man.