Tom Ford Quotes

I'd like to believe that achieving a leadership position is all about competency, capability and ambition, so I try not to distinguish between the sexes when it comes to giving career advice.

People don't want to serve apprenticeships any more. Kids expect to be paid and treated really well and all that guff before they've achieved anything. It doesn't work like that. You have to spend five or six years being relatively rubbish and put up with it. For that you don't deserve to be getting lottery money.

Knowledge-based apprenticeships kickstart careers. Just look at British fashion designer Karen Millen, for example, who learned her craft through an apprenticeship scheme.

At some point you realize, I have dreams. I would love to be working on wonderful roles, in wonderful films, with people I respect and admire. And that will come in its time. In the meantime, "Pay attention to your work. Get better at what you do." That's my job.

My life has always been about making certain I accrue the skills necessary to make my ambitions real.

You have to work your way up - that's how I was brought up and what I believe in: working hard.

Having done what I've done at 24 years old, I'm not the kind of person who likes to be out of work.

I think it's very important that girls see themselves as a brand - they have to go after what they want and be ready to work very hard.

That was how I felt at non-league. I never looked at it then and said, 'I want to be a Premier League manager one day'. I just wanted to do a good job and see where it could take me.

But I am not the sort of person who would go and seek work. I believe that if I do my job well work will come to me.

I want to work as hard as I can and continue to make a career for myself.

I just want to do the best work wherever I go. It could be here in Pakistan or India or anywhere else.

I always knew I wanted to work hard at something.

I'm very career-minded.

I like people who work hard.

I know I wasn't allowed to go to fashion school; I can't cut a dress like Galliano, right? But I had enough wherewithal to go to that studio on my first collection and bring Kim, [stylist] Christine Centenera, Ian Connor, Theophilus London, Virgil Abloh...they all came down to [Vetements/Balenciaga designer] Demna Gvasalia's studio that night and hung out.

I know a lot of famous people didn't do well at school, like James Brown; he dropped out in fifth grade to be an entertainer, I respect that... but that's not going to be me. I'm not going to be able to do anything but work as hard as possible all the time and compete with everyone I know all the time to make it.

People always ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom they admire the most.

I've been working with Riccardo Tisci from Givenchy.It's been a long collaboration, and I don't think it's going to stop now. It's very important to me. Riccardo is younger than me, so it's great to have someone new teaching you in everything, not just in fashion. I'm teaching him in French style, what a women's style is, but he's teaching me in all of these different styles of music.I love this new world for me. It's refreshing and nourishing to keep learning about new things.

Fashion as a whole is a farce, completely. The people behind it are perverted, the styles are created by freaked out people, just natural weirdos. I know this because I worked with all those people while I was modeling.

Everything I have is ready to wear, but I have the ability to have different options within the same brand. I have the Theyskens' Theory collection where it's a personal approach to how I build the collection where I fuse more fashion-y ideas and it has my name on it. So it's really something very research- and labor-intensive. And then I have the Theory brand where I infuse all points of view about fashion at large, and it's more global. It's really about making something succeed. You have an instant relationship with stores, and with sales teams, and people that are in the place.

The more I work, the more I want to work.

One cannot expect to coast along and rise automatically to the top, no matter what friends you may have in the company. There may have been a time when, in large corporations, a person could rise simply because he had a stock interest or because he had friends in top management. That's not true today. Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you're not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.

Every time I make a "Mission" movie or other films, people kind of look at me and go, "Well, now what? What's next?" I think there's always going to be another mountain. I think there's something always in store.

The very, very first thing that I wanted was to make a living - be independent and have a job. It might have come later, that kind of reaction to the boringness of fashion.