I don't want to be defined by being the founder of the Body Shop, and I don't want to be defined as a woman suffering from Hepatitis C. There's more to my life than that.

We entrepreneurs are loners, vagabonds, troublemakers. Success is simply a matter of finding and surrounding ourselves with those open-minded and clever souls who can take our insanity and put it to good use.

I wake up every morning thinking...this is my last day. And I jam everything into it. There's no time for mediocrity. This is no damned dress rehearsal.

The bigger you grow, the more intimate communication has to be. It almost has to be belly and belly. As you get bigger and bigger in an organization, everything gets more and more detached and everything is on email or voicemail. That's the worse thing because lack of intimacy is one of the downsides (of growth).

When you take the high moral road it is difficult for anyone to object without sounding like a complete fool.

I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.

We were most creative when our back was against the wall.