A biography for Simon Cowellhasn’t been written yet.
“For the music business, social networking is brilliant. Just when you think it's doom and gloom and you have to spend millions of pounds on marketing and this and that, you have this amazing thing now called fan power. The whole world is linked through a laptop. It's amazing. And it's free. I love it. It's absolutely brilliant.”
“I don't think I can do this anymore.”
“When you're making a reality show, you can't even plan a week ahead now.”
“I was 12 years old when I first realized that food could be hot. That's why I turned out the way I am.”
“When I was young and we got caught pinching apples, we got a smack from the local policeman. Today if that happened he would be sued. There is a tendency to punish the victim, not the criminal. If someone broke into my house or my mum's house, I worry that the burglar has more rights than me.”
“If you've got a big mouth and you're controversial, you're going to get attention.”
“I don't mind being cast as some kind of a pantomime baddie, but I am very fair in business. I always have been. I pride myself on being fair.”
“Every time I sat in a chemistry lesson, I thought, 'What am I doing this for? I don't ever want to be in a job that involves a Bunsen burner.'”
“I'm obsessed with cleanliness for myself, so I will take a bath three times a day, sometimes a steam twice a day in addition to that.”
“The love I have for my ex-girlfriends will always be there, so I think that's true love.”
“Most things in music go full circle eventually.”
“You always want to go to a party where you get an invite.”
“The young people working for me are ambitious and hard-working. That work ethic has always been a trait of the British.”
“I could just sit back and get someone to spin my achievements, I suppose, but when I see others do it, I always think, 'Why are you telling me how successful you are?' I am always suspicious of those kinds of boasts.”
“Sometimes when you have a record out, you think you're going to go in at No. 1 but you go in at No. 8. So your second record has to be better. That's how I treat it.”
“At 20, you're cocky and you think you can rule the world, and you get it all wrong.”
“I want people to understand that from the minute Lady Gaga arrived, she created a new set of rules: being different is good; embrace it.”
“I don't want to tell a 15 or 14 year old what they should be doing. I want them to tell me. And that's what I got when I met Justin Bieber for the first time.”
“The only people with power today are the audience. And that is increasing with Twitter, Facebook, and everything else. We cater to their likes and dislikes, and you ignore that at your peril.”
“I'm going to give all my money away, eventually. I don't believe in all this hand-down stuff. Even if I had kids, I don't think I'd want to give them everything.”