I'm not great at taking compliments because I always find the thing I could do better.

The minute I think 'Oh God, I don't want to do this because I'm scared,' is the moment I have to do something, whatever it is.

I'm not a woman in the 'Den,' I'm a Dragon, we're all there to invest, it has nothing to do with gender.

I don't cook at all, and whenever my husband Paul goes away he leaves meals for me and I can't even be bothered to put them in the oven.

You can't beat a bar of chocolate between cheap white bread - there is nothing like it.

I don't exactly know the moment that I was a millionaire but it was in my twenties.

I didn't want to get married.

Business doesn't cut you any slack because of your gender. You're either good at what you do or you're not.

It can be difficult to find investment for a new business, particularly one which is highly innovative or breaks new ground.

We have a very good history of manufacturing in this country but I worry that these skills are being lost. We walk around saying, 'We haven't got any manufacturing any more' but Made In Britain really means something, particularly in other parts of the world. We need to support British manufacturing.

Both my parents were entrepreneurs and built a nice leisure business. But money was tight when I was growing up.

My parents felt I should earn my money because I would then value it. So they would pay me a shilling or two to do jobs such as washing the car, cleaning and washing up.

My first paid job was leading pony rides along Minehead seafront when I was eight. I probably got paid sixpence - not much but I loved horses and it gave me a great chance to be near them.

I think I'm absolutely perfect. Because if I'm not good at something I completely banish it from my mind. Completely. Like it never happened.

People can be very serious with me, and expect me to be very businesslike all the time. So I have to help them get over that by showing them that I enjoy life.

Nearly everybody, when they first meet me, seems to have this sense of trepidation.

I won't get involved in businesses that I think cut across any kind of animal welfare issues.

The one thing I say, I will invest in anything - I don't care what it is - as long as it doesn't cut across my ethical code, because at the end of the day I want to be able to live with myself. I want to feel proud of what I do.

If someone needs help, I don't do tea and sympathy, but I'm honest and practical - that's how I was brought up.

People shouldn't choose their careers on whether it's cool or not. They should choose their careers on, 'Are they good at it, do they love it, is it going to give them a good life?'

I often see people who I think could be really successful in business but they just don't realise they have the skills and they don't believe in themselves.

I don't like anything with too much dependency. Children are very dependent, which is probably why we never had them.

I am a more rounded person than you see on television. You don't bark your way to being a success.

Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.

We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.

Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

A double bind is far worse than a straightforward damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma. It requires you to obey two mutually exclusive commands: Anything you do to fulfill one violates the other.

Why don't men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation', garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book.

Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's.

The death of compromise has become a threat to our nation as we confront crucial issues such as the debt ceiling and that most basic of legislative responsibilities: a federal budget. At stake is the very meaning of what had once seemed unshakable: 'the full faith and credit' of the U.S. government.

A sister is like yourself in a different movie, a movie that stars you in a different life.

An assumption underlying almost all comments on interruptions is that they are aggressive, but the line between what's perceived as assertiveness or aggressiveness almost certainly shifts with an interrupter's gender.

Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless. Daughters and mothers, I found, both overestimate the other's power - and underestimate their own.

Mothers subject their daughters to a level of scrutiny people usually reserve for themselves. A mother's gaze is like a magnifying glass held between the sun's rays and kindling. It concentrates the rays of imperfection on her daughter's yearning for approval. The result can be a conflagration - whoosh.

Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention - an argument culture.

In this world, conversations are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus. They try to protect themselves from others' attempts to push them away.

For many women, and a fair number of men, saying 'I'm sorry' isn't literally an apology; it's a ritual way of restoring balance to a conversation.

Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.

In some ways, siblings, and especially sisters, are more influential in your childhood than your parents.

In a world of status, independence is key, because a primary means of establishing status is to tell others what to do, and taking orders is a marker of low status. Though all humans need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. It is as if their lifeblood ran in different directions.

For each other, at each other: Sisters can be either or both. The same could be said of people in any close relationship. Yet there is something special about sisters - specially gratifying and specially fraught.

Conflict and opposition are as necessary as cooperation and agreement, but the scale is off balance, with conflict and opposition overweighted.

A sister is someone who owns part of what you own: a house, perhaps, or a less tangible legacy, like memories of your childhood and the experience of your family.

When daughters react with annoyance or even anger at the smallest, seemingly innocent remarks, mothers get the feeling that talking to their daughters can be like walking on eggshells: they have to watch every word.

Birth order is fascinating, and it is forever.

I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. For part of my life, I was living in Detroit, and I remember a friend of mine commenting she could always tell when I had been speaking to my mother because my New York accent had come back.

'Right' and 'wrong' aren't words a linguist uses.