“When I was working in my first job engineering construction, what I liked the most was working with architects and making buildings that had this creative side coming from the architect and that were making them a big success.”

I’ve always been pleased with the investments I’ve made with my friend Albert Frere and I regret not having followed him more, because I would have been a lot richer.

Affordable luxury – these are two words that don’t go together.

China is clearly going to be the number one economic power and it is already full of potential.. with lots of population and the buying power increasing by the day. .

Oh, I was brought up in the north of France, and I had a very enjoyable childhood with my family working as entrepreneur.

And rather than detracting from the principal job, it reinforces it. I think of that money as venture capital. It’s not a big investment.

I take time to get close to, and I don’t immediately throw my arms round someone.

When you are on the management side, you still have to understand the artistic sensibility so that there is a dialogue with the creative side.

Luxury goods are the only area in which it is possible to make luxury margins.

I like that combination between creativity and the creative process and the organization needed to make a business like this successful worldwide.

I think this is a challenge we face, how the global region will evolve in stability with such a fast growth. If they succeed to do that, no doubt, in the next generation it will be the major area of the world, economically.

It is not enough to have a talented designer; the management must be inspired too. The creative process is very disorganised; the production process has to be very rational.

What we do in our group is the opposite of the bad effects of globalization. We produce in Italy and in France and we sell to China, when usually it’s the opposite.

A good product can last forever.

When something has to be done, do it! In France we are full of good ideas, but we rarely put them into practice.

Luxury goods are the only area in which it is possible to make luxury margins.

I think in business, you have to learn to be patient. Maybe I’m not very patient myself. But I think that I’ve learned the most is be able to wait for something and get it when it’s the right time.

And there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else’s drawing sounds like going back to heaven.

It always surprises me when donors who operate successful businesses assume that just building a school structure means that a community now has access to education.

Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It’s really, like, physically painful, and it’s a brand of crazy I don’t appreciate having.

But as I’ve gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there’s a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn’t actually account for the world.

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.

My life is about building and working and wrenching on some cars.

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age.Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.