I do believe the harder you work, the luckier you get.

I had no plans to be an entrepreneur. I just wanted to be a journalist and write for a magazine. At 15, I just decided to leave school and launch a national student magazine.

To be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running, and if you have a good team around you and more than a fair share of luck, you might make something happen. But you certainly can't guarantee it just by following someone else's formula.

To me, business isn't about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It's about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials.

Because I don't see Virgin as a company but as a way of life and I fully enjoy it, I don't think I'll ever retire.

If you offer people a decent service, if you give them you know Internet access, if their phones are not cut off on the trains, you know if you have plugs where they can plug in their computers, and if you have a smiling, cheerful staff; and if you can travel really quickly, then you can make a success out of the rail business.

There are millions of people out there who would love to become astronauts, who'd love to go to space - they'd love to look back at this wonderful world from space. That will be the engine that will enable us then to develop spaceships to transport people around the world at tremendous speeds in an environmentally friendly way.