If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.

There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence - and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap.

Exactly 5,126 attempts to make the first bagless vacuum cleaner were failures-some catastrophic disappointments, some minor defects. It took 15 years. Prototype 5,127 was the success ... Failure is painful, but it spurs on improvement like nothing else.

Companies are not ingenious, it's the people in them that are.

The way the world is going, it's technology driven. And it isn't just driven by the old super powers, it's driven by the far east and new emerging economies.

I imported the first Mac into England in 1984; you know, the beige box. I imported what I think were the first four that came into England. I never opened the instruction manual. That was the best thing about it.

If you really want to improve technology, if you want things to work better and be better, you've got to protect the person who spends a lot of effort, money, and time developing that new technology.