Pierre Daix

"This political shock could only further worsen things. So many opportunities surely for me who was in dire need to continue to expand. I was not mistaken."

"A presence due to his focus when he listens, to the penetration of his blue gaze, and to the sudden changes of his face, which can switch in a moment from the tension of blockage to the lightness of a smile or the frankest laugh."

"Indeed, his strength, as soon as circumstances helped him get himself started, was to think like a strategist. That is, to look beyond breaking news, beyond ongoing operations, especially if they were so important as to monopolize his attention completely. And even beyond debts to be settled, which, unlike others, he always took great pains to pay off in full, especially if it was unexpected or difficult."

"It's merely an introduction to a complete man, as sure of his allure as he is of the effects of his formidable anger, who possesses a deep understanding of how to take action, a quality that his overwhelmed or frustrated competitors, and journalists, would call "strokes," failing to appreciate the often prolonged and arduous preparation or the objective."

"He is a man who has endowed himself with singular means because he has always had the calm audacity to think differently, to think ahead."

"When a period is difficult, the most tenacious resist and thus widen the gap with the others.""

""It was very pretentious, he says today, and it took a long time to get started, because I had several really heavy handicaps, no training for business theory, no or few relationships, no money. I learned everything on the job, in my first client-producer contacts. I had to earn my first kopecks, organize a network of relationships. It was not simple, you can believe me. The business world is very closed when you don't really know who you are and they're not expecting you.""

"have always been uncompromising towards those who, having claimed responsibilities, subsequently proved incapable of assuming them, whether through incompetence or lack of work""

"Everything is there, in few words, as is his habit. A frank analysis of the situation. The conclusion that, as soon as you control transformation and trade, primary exploitation is not indispensable (and probably not generating enough added value)."

""I rolled the 'r's, I had an accent. They made me feel that I was dressed poorly. I was met with sneers and ridicule. I did not accept it. They didn't make fun of me for long. I was not the strongest, but I was the most fighter. I discovered young people who, undoubtedly because of their bourgeoisie attitude, were convinced they were in the right place, acting as they should and treating those who did not belong to their environment as a slightly inferior race. We were allowed to go out once a month with our parents. I remember when my mother came to pick me up in the visiting room with her basket, dressed as a peasant, they ridiculed her." As long as one knows him, they could hear how these humiliations were indelible and have marked his future behaviour, but, what mattered most, was that the taste for revenge did not lead him to regret or bitterness, on the contrary to conquest, not to make a place among those who excluded him, but to surpass them by applying other rules of conduct than their own."

"The boss then teaches him his golden rule that a sale is not a gain for the company, but a debt of the customer until the money is in."

"What he has just achieved with the help of his clients and the few workers he had at the time has become a kind of dress rehearsal for his approach at the start of his career. His favourite way of progressing is to storm the difficulties, to force his way through. He has always, and he will always, aim to mobilise those who work with him, to instill in them more than a team spirit, a real spirit of attack and conquest. And this first aggressive move initiated a plentiful series. "I often had a rebellious attitude towards my competitors, I never fit into the mould, into the professional schemes," he confides to me with certain satisfaction."