Women Born In The 1950s

"I think probably word of mouth – listening to friends descriptions of faraway places and then I start reading up about wherever and the more you read the more inspired and determined you are to get there!"

"Your people are your key assets, so it’s important to focus on well-being, morale, and listening."

"Handmade Rooster footstools -they are exquisitely made at every stage of their production with bronze beaks and feet – you can even have them made to look like your own farmyard flock!"

"“Don’t circumscribe your own ambition – go for it – you might not get it – but go for it.”"

"If you force yourself to be a square peg in a round hole you’re never going to be that happy."

""Life is too short to push yourself to do jobs you think you ought to – just do jobs that make you happy, because if you’re happy the likelihood is you will do your job well and be successful.”"

""Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.”"

"Think about how to stand out as a candidate in your own right, not just a 'woman' coming through on the 'woman on boards' agenda – how to compete with the best men out there without making it about gender."

"Women often hold themselves back because they don't think they tick all the boxes. You need to be self aware enough to realise whether those boxes actually all need ticking – you will always learn a lot on the job."

"“I never felt that there was any barrier to me as a woman, and I always felt that there were people encouraging me.”"

""There’s never a right or wrong time to do it – your career will work around you having children.”"

"Being part of a ‘club’ or network is something women need to get serious about. Networks aren’t just a ‘nice to have.’ They offer support – critical no matter what level you’re at – and they also make businesses sense."

"Authenticity is crucial - you need to embody the values and behaviours that you want your business to espouse. I believe you have to be 'present' and visible. Your team needs to know you're in and that they have your support. You should be there for them in a crisis rather than create a culture of blame and fear. You cannot overestimate the importance of COMMUNICATION. Most people don't communicate anywhere near enough."

"Once you are in a job you can build a team around you that will complement your skills."

"Deal with the matter swiftly and decisively. Any prevarication only makes the crisis bigger, particularly once the press get hold of it."

"“Do I protect my life or my modesty? No contest.”"

"When in doubt just smile and smile and say nothing."

"Life's too short not to do something you love doing and if you love your job you will probably do it well."

"I think that people pay too much attention to getting academic qualifications - not everyone can get them. There is a place in that whole system for well run apprenticeship schemes."

"“The reason why I am so passionate about apprentices and apprenticeships is that they have added the goods all the way through my career.""

"I feel this really isn't an award just for me, it's for all the people who have created the right environment for all those people to succeed and the apprentices and the young people themselves."

"“I think I was seen as someone who got things done, a problem solver, but from my point of view that always involved getting the right people around the table.”"

"overnight – not least in our scale and geography. That said, we were determined to stay true to our values and the family feel of our business, and we work hard to maintain that for our colleagues and our customers."

"Yes, technology is huge for us, from the state-of-the-art systems that are used by our retail network, Independence Group members and personal travel consultants, to our customer facing website – which we have invested in recently – to the App we are creating, and how we use AI. We are constantly developing how we improve our customer experience and business through technology."

"“The people currently running the council are not interested in empty rhetoric, they just want to get things done.”"

"We are committed to providing excellent value and friendly, professional service and expertise to our customers, who trust us with their holiday plans. Being the UK’s largest independent travel agent means we have access to unparalleled choice and value, which we share with our customers through our network of branches around the UK, through our personal travel consultants who work from home, our virtual call centre, and our digital channels."

"“I am very proud to have created and built Boom Pictures into one of the fastest growing indies by attracting some of the best talent in the industry.""

"You have to be able to live with uncertainty. You really have to dig in and persist because every deal gets tough. But to me it is all about the people that I am working with. I didn’t set this up to work with people I don’t want to work with. I set it up to work with people that I want to work with.”"

"I wrote the book because black women in America have been protected and insulated against certain kinds of criticism and examination."

"“Crises never go away, they only get bigger.""

"She saw them before they saw her, the two men leaning against a dusty red Cortina and looking out of place in the regimented grey street. Her heart lurched and her stomach sickened. There was a stitch in her left side and she leaned heavily into it, pressing her palm hard against the spot, her breathing ragged as she came to a dead stop."

"racism is not a white problem; it's a problem of the world."

"the church has done more to destroy people in the Caribbean than any other institution."

"[about the character Hyacinth in The Unbelonging] the reason she's an outsider here [in England] is because she never ever made a life here. She lived there in the past, but time continued."

"because I have written a book which actually goes to the heart of how poor people are kept in control - which is by the church actually doing the job for the government - people are resentful."

"Joan Riley has an extraordinary ability to portray pain and loneliness...her novels become powerful parables of the creation and destruction of illusions... It is this quality which steels Joan Riley's work and the lives of her characters."

"We have a word - I don't know if you have anything like it in America - we say that something "clide" you. It gets so strong that you get sick of it. That's how I used to feel about black American literature, especially that of the men, because it was very defeatist. It's a certain something very much like fundamentalist Christianity. It never actually looked at internal blame, which is as important as external blame, because if you can't take responsibility you're not human and you're not adult and you're not able then to ask for a share in things."

"I think I'm an odd kind of Caribbean writer in the sense that I don't come out of the rich, middle-class elite who are the traditional writers. It's almost like cloning themselves, you know. So what they write is very much their image of the world. There's never been a voice that's been a poor voice, and I've never, ever seen myself reflected in Jamaican fiction. To some extent in Olanda Paterson, but very little. All of them, including Olive Senior, can't get into the psyche [of poor people] because they don't know it and it's an alien place, something they are afraid of. And so what happens is that they create a distorted image of people like me and my family."

"I started to write because I was getting so angry that I thought that I was going to explode, because the images on the television I was seeing about Jamaica were deliberately misleading images. It was at the time that Jamaica was going through a very bad patch, you know. It was fermenting; there was lots of destabilization. I saw it from the other side...from the mean streets of Kingston. On television they would only spin the shacks and they would say, "This is Jamaica." And of course the way it was being portrayed didn't happen."

"It struck me that memory is actually quite negative in lots of ways because it stops you from creating new, sustaining memories as a kind of other to survive with...It's...as though if you don't resolve all that luggage you carry around with you, it somehow is going to come back and haunt you."

"[about writing a character who works as a cleaner] you've got to look beyond the mop because there's a human being there; and until you can accept the fact that people are people and stop seeing people through the eyes of occupation segregation then you are always going to be prepared to step on people."

"(Q: Your first three novels are powerful indictments of racism, Joan. Yet you've gotten some negative responses from the British for them.) Riley: I think because I'm writing about their backyard. It's okay for people from elsewhere to write even similar things, but it's not right to write about British systems in the same way."

"I've been told my poetry is anti-male and anti-white. I think that's very unfair because it raises issues like, Have I not got a right to protest against your exploiting me because you are being exploited, too? I mean, isn't that how we get into hierarchy? And isn't that how we get into trouble? Well, people don't like those questions."

"Jamaicans don't like to admit to all of the things that are wrong with their society. Children are unprotected. They are fair game, basically. Violence against women and children is endemic and accepted. Academics write about it as if it is a subversive act. Women are simply expendable, and when they write about it, it is always a woman's fault somehow. A woman is mad because she is drinking or something. There's never any rational reason why somebody reaches this point."

"In Unbelonging the past is a handicap, just as it is for so many people here. It's something that stops them from going forward because they've never actually come to terms with exile. It is as much exile if you emigrate as if you came because you had to, particularly for young people who came in their preteens. They had no choice. They are as much exiled as a political refugee. Memory is a funny thing. It keeps you sane because there is another, better dreamland that you can escape to. It commonly has that function here. But what happens when memory comes up against reality? That's what has caused so much pain for people here. When they were able somehow to find the money - half of them actually went to the moneylenders to get it - and went back to paradise, paradise was an illusion. What happens with memory is that it's very faulty. It edits out pain."

"I've always been very unhappy about leaders. I see my brother with his cap in his hand, with his head bowed just like my uncles-probably like my grandfathers and my great-grandfathers-and he's saying, "Mr. Manley, liberate us, man." Then I think, But, you're not liberated. And that's because we look always to somebody else. I never write about the leader. It's always the antihero because the antihero is the salt of the earth. And if this earth is to have any chance, it is the antihero we are going to have to look to."

"Focus on the issues you care about, not the positions you want to attain."

"She loves this city for its people, neighborhoods, potential and quality of life, including abundant access to nature."

"I sympathize with that frustration. Although I opposed the proposition, it wasn't because I want to see people camping near parks or schools."

"We have some big challenges ahead of us, but I believe we can take them on together."