Nick Candy

Sometimes our idea of luxuries are our client’s ideas of necessities. You might think having a helicopter pad in the back garden, 20 housekeepers and two tennis coaches is over the top. But for them it’s like you buying a sandwich.

In New York and Los Angeles, you can throw your car keys to the valet and he parks it. Same in Hong Kong and Singapore, the service is off the scale. In London it’s sub-standard to abysmal.

London has got better as it’s become more international – you only have to look at the quality of the restaurants to see how improved it’s become.

We started learning ourselves, understanding ourselves, reading, researching, going around the world and looking at what was defined as the very best.

No one should buy on reputation alone. They should come and see it and inspect it, feel it and touch it.

When you are in real estate, you are going to make some mistakes.

We know everything about our clients – if they like their dressing gowns heated, what colour flowers they like, if their chef works left-handed – we know everything and we incorporate it into our work for them.

My motto is: Always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.

Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.

The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.

I never insisted that I was a good student.

One client didn’t want to go out so had us build him a nightclub in his house.

It’s not just about being better. It’s about being different. You need to give people a reason to choose your business.

Without hustle, talent will only carry you so far.

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.

My mother was an entrepreneur… She found being on relief humiliating. She built this business from scratch… In 1951 my mother opened this store…

Do not primarily train men to work. Train them to serve willingly and intelligently.

First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it.

A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

The tooth fairy teaches children that they can sell body parts for money.

Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous.