Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Korda

It strikes me that people want to be engaged, and that those who go into a bookstore in a time of crisis are much more likely to be looking for explanation than for escapism.

It's not a field, I think, for people who need to have success every day: if you can't live with a nightly sort of disaster, you should get out. I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that the ghosts you chase you never catch.

In Eastern Europe, the past is not only always hovering over the present, it is not even passed. It waits, like some malevolent caged beast, ready at any moment to escape and bring back all the horrors.

Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.

FDR had a certain charisma, at least in his first term, with the big grin, the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle, and the battered hat on his imposing head, but no other American president since then has had it except JFK - indeed, some of them have been positively anti-charismatic, like Gerald Ford, Carter, and the Bushes.

If you don't believe in yourself, then who will believe in you? The next man's way of getting there might not necessarily work for me, so I have to create my own ways of getting there.

One of the first rules of playing the power game is that all bad news must be accepted calmly, as if one already knew and didn't care.

To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.

I don't give plots to Harold Robbins or Graham Greene, because they don't need them, but a lot of authors do.

I do not start with a full knowledge of the facts; the whole attraction of writing history is to educate myself: it is an exploration into the unknown - 'a journey without maps,' to borrow Graham Greene's phrase.

I never met Peter O'Toole, but he one was of those rare actors whose success was defined by a single role. His incandescent performance in David Lean's 'Lawrence of Arabia' is one that nobody who saw it will ever forget.

Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement.

I'm a relatively unfocused person.

Surrounded by high-paid publicity people and professional ego massagers, movie stars, like politicians, almost invariably come to believe that they are nicer, more charming, and more beloved than they appear to be to a casual observer, and that their stories about their careers are universally fascinating.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

When I started work at Simon & Schuster in 1958, each of us got a bronze paperweight on which was written, in raised type, 'Give the reader a break,' Richard E. Simon.

I came into book publishing without any particular impulse to be in book publishing.

In my experience, with very few exceptions - I am, as it happens, one of the exceptions - the one thing that most editors don't want to do is edit. It's not nearly as conducive to a successful career as having lunch out with important agents or going to meetings where you get noticed.

The rich and famous expect to get a lot for their story, whether they are writing it themselves or not. It's not that they need the money, of course; it's a question of ego, like catching the biggest fish.

Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.

The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.

Frost was no match for Nixon - far from being an intrepid and challenging interviewer, he was a pushover for the great and the famous, always deeply impressed with the fact that here he was, David Frost, putting questions to - Richard Nixon!

The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work supremely well, without attending to appearance.

The freedom to fail is vital if you're going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The more you can dream, the more you can do.

Curiosity is the best motive for writing: curiosity about the world at large, or about oneself.

We British and Americans have never been conquered and occupied by the Germans, or forced to make the choice between defiance and collaboration, or haunted by the choices, evasions and moral ambiguities that only a defeated and occupied country can feel.

Never reveal all of yourself to other people; hold back something in reserve so that people are never quite sure if they really know you.

It's often said that everybody has a story to tell, and I suppose that's true, but the problem is that most of them aren't worth telling.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.

I'd fought in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, having left Oxford to do so.

An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition.

What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.

For a book publisher, there is hardly a more dangerous category than that of celebrity autobiography. Forget who it's by, most books of this kind not only fail but fail big, since they are invariably expensive.

I'm always astonished when I go into Barnes & Noble at the number of people buying books, of course, but also at the variety of books they do buy and the extent to which they are not the big bestsellers.

My books are based on observing others, not myself.

I come from a family that was very strong, very successful, very bizarre, and terrifically exciting. Being a Korda is something I regard as special - not wonderful, or worthy of a national monument, but special.

I always thought of myself as a kind of literary bureaucrat. And that was never going to be enough for me.

Years of standing in the limelight portraying other people for large amounts of money does not usually lead to a high degree of self-examination, let alone self-criticism.

Of course the rich and famous tend to have more going on in their lives than ordinary people, but they aren't always willing to tell the interesting bits.

My own aunt was Merle Oberon, so movie stardom was not a faraway mystery to me as a child: it was part of the family business.

The pleasure lies not in the cookies, but in the pattern the crumbs make when the cookies crumble.

The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own.

Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility... in the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have... is the ability to take on responsibility.

The purely agitation attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.

I am a stupendously fast reader and always have been. I can read in at least three languages fluently and two languages with a little bit more difficulty.

The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble.

Luck can often mean simply taking advantage of a situation at the right moment. It is possible to make your luck by being always prepared.

If you're a retailer and know that once a year you're going to get Mary Higgins Clark's book on a given date, you're going to have an awful lot of copies out there in time for that. You'd have to be simple-minded not to do that - although bookselling prior to 1950 never made that connection.

To have a childhood surrounded by people like Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh sounds glitzy, but for years I wanted to repress it. I couldn't take that kind of power and success.

Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed.

Hebron is a bone of contention between Israeli settlers and the Palestinians in part because Abraham is buried there, in the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

The bestseller list is the tip of the iceberg.

One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.

Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.

Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars - or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.

This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure.

Success was always critical to me. What it meant was winning enough praise and external admiration that I could feel myself to be a logical extension of my Uncle Alex, Uncle Zoli, and my father, in that order.