Karren Brady

“I'm very comfortable in my own skin.”

“I'm not going to become an MP and I'm not going to be London Mayor. I have no political ambitions.”

“I always laugh when I read about sexism cases in the newspaper.”

“The only thing I wanted when I left school was independence. I had been at boarding school for many years. When you're boarding, nothing is your own and your whole day is scheduled. You're told when to sleep, what to eat and when. You have zero independence.”

“Good managers ensure good outcomes, but great leaders can deliver a vision by getting people to work together.”

“What I love about London is you can go out of your door and turn left or right, and you could eat at every restaurant and still never go round in a loop.”

“When you're starting your own business it's really important to think through your plan: what's the idea, why is it relevant to the market, how much money you are going to invest, how are you going to tell people about it.”

“Too many women don't see themselves in senior leadership and so don't push themselves to advance their careers as their male peer group do.”

“You have to have two personalities: your home personality and your work personality and the trick really is not to allow one of those personalities to drain the life out of the other.”

“In my experience, not all women want to run the world. Not all women want to run a big banking conglomerate. Not all women want to be prime minister. What a lot of women want is a good career that respects them... and high-quality, affordable childcare.”

“I'm proud to say that, leading by example, I've tried from day one to help recalibrate views of women in the world of football.”

“The toughest thing about being a success is you've got to keep on being a success.”

“The problems children bring get bigger as they get older.”

“Though I don't have time to go to the gym, I am fit and active, and have a healthy diet.”

“It's depressing that ambition and feminism have become almost dirty words for working women. But, there is no reason that they should be and, increasingly, I am struck by how the next generation is challenging conceptions of what it means to be successful at work.”

“When I was younger, I wanted to be tall and skinny. And because I wasn't, I was disappointed. The great thing about getting older is that I've come to accept my shape - and embrace it.”

“I can never fully switch off given my work, but laying on the beach replying to a few emails on my mobile is much better than being stuck in the office.”

“I believe that hardworking people should retain as much of the money as they can in terms of the taxes that they pay. But I think everybody should pay their taxes.”

“I was called fried eggs and all that at school. Size does matter.”

“I'm a hard cheese person and I could have it with biscuits for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”