If you want to do something different, you’re going to come up against a lot of naysayers.

Having a good idea is one thing, but persuading other people to buy it is quite another. Good inventors are polymaths: they think with their hands and their brains. They're experts in design, engineering and business.

If you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think.

I just think things should work properly.

The Web is fascinating and transformative, but it's an easy, flashy, get-rich-quick option to the hard graft of proper industry.

Everybody recognizes that if you can make very efficient electric motors, you can make a quantum leap forward.

Successes teach you nothing. Failures teach you everything. Making mistakes is the most important thing you can do.