I Don’t like lawyers. I think all they do is delay deals, instead of making deals, and every answer they give you is no

a letter from George Peacock, who ended by saying, “As with most things in life, time calls for change and it is best to accept that fact. Nevertheless, I shall always be proud of my involvement in the creation of Trump Tower and fondly remember how we worked to bring it about.

The New York Stock Exchange happens to be the biggest casino in the world. The only thing that makes it different from the average casino is that the players dress in blue pinstripe suits and carry leather briefcases. If you allow people to gamble in the stock market, where more money is made and lost than in all the casinos of the world put together, I see nothing terribly different about permitting people to bet on blackjack or craps or roulette.

I have a very simple rule when it comes to management: hire the best people from your competitors, pay them more than they were earning, and give them bonuses and incentives based on their performance. That’s how you build a first-class operation.

To me, committees are what insecure people create in order to put off making hard decisions. But at least I’d gotten the fall question on the table as a serious issue.

I like consultants even less than I like committees. When it comes to making a smart decision, the most distinguished planning committee working with the highest-priced consultants doesn’t hold a candle to a group of guys with a reasonable amount of common sense and their own money on the line.

It irritates me that critics, who’ve neither designed nor built anything themselves, are given carte blanche to express their views in the pages of major publications, whereas the targets of their criticism are almost never offered space to respond.

“Television City is far from a certainty,” it said. “The project must work its way through the city approval process, where anything from bureaucratic inertia to political cowardice can kill it.