Anyone who tells you they know the future is telling you the most grotesque lie, because none of us do.

It's actually as simple as this. New authors, building their customer base, need physical bookshops. Physical bookshops are lovely tactile, friendly, expert, welcoming places. Physical books, which can only be seen and handled in physical bookshops, are lovely, tactile things. Destroy those bookshops, and the very commercial and cultural base to the book industry is destroyed. Once and for all. Like Humpty Dumpty, it can never be put together again.

Anyone who tells you they know the future is telling you the most grotesque lie, because none of us do.

I believe that the mindset that allows you to spend your working life thanking and congratulating people rather than being unpleasant to them is the mainstay of good leadership.

Its intuition that works. Just intuition.

Ignore the received wisdom of any industry you’re entering. Never be trapped by dogma. Never let other people’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Its intuition that works. Just intuition.""Waterstones was aimed at me. I knew that I wanted, and badly needed in my life, bookshops just like the ones I was creating. I simply assumed that plenty of other people, no doubt of wildly differing demographics, would find once they saw them that they wanted them too. Well - they did.