Roman Abramovich

In Moscow I feel most comfortable. I’m used to four different seasons; it’s difficult for people in London to understand. People brought up in Russia like my kids want to play in the snow.

The goal is to win. It’s not about making money. I have many much less risky ways of making money than this (buying Chelsea football club). I don’t want to throw my money away, but it’s really about having fun and that means success and trophies.

I have no Napoleonic dream. I’m just hard-working and pragmatic.

I never made any public statements, at least I tried never to make any public statements. I know I don’t do it well, I become very nervous, I forget what it is that I mean to say, I can’t really convey my logic and my thought to the journalists, so I decided this is not my thing, I really shouldn’t be doing it.

To tell the truth I cannot call my childhood bad. In your childhood you can’t compare things: one eats carrots, one eats candy, both taste good. As a child you cannot tell the difference.

I decided to sit quietly and do business and don’t stick your neck out and tell everybody everything belongs to me. That would only cause problems for myself. Therefore I never told these stories or declared all these things to anyone.

I quickly figured out [that] the one ability I’d better have is to create relationships.

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

A well-run restaurant is like a winning baseball team. It makes the most of every crew member’s talent and takes advantage of every split-second opportunity to speed up service.

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves. but they can get very excited by those who do. That is why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest, the greatest and the most spectacular.

This is serious business. But it doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun along the way.

The thought in my mind was that I must be a good merchant. If I were a good merchant, the rest would probably take care of itself.

We pay attention to every demographic in every country, so we’re going to focus on building things that teens are going to like, and we’re also going to focus on building things that other folks are going to like.

Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

Not everybody is some kind of media model.

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

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.

We have a very open culture at the company, where we foster a lot of interaction between not just me and people but between everyone else. It’s an open floor plan. People have these desks where no one really has an office. I mean, I have a room where I meet with people. But it has all glass, so everyone can see into it and see what’s going on.