“One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.”
― Michael Korda
“The pleasure lies not in the cookies, but in the pattern the crumbs make when the cookies crumble.”
― Michael Korda
“In ‘Gran Torino,’ Eastwood moves towards the climax of the movie not by staging a shoot-out, but by putting his weapons to one side and confronting the bad guys armed only with a cigarette lighter, guessing that as he reaches for it they will think he’s drawing a pistol.”
― Michael Korda
“To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“There used to be a strong belief that if you wanted to know what was really going on in a country, the best thing to do was to go there and ask a taxi driver.”
― Michael Korda
“Nothing in the Middle East is ever forgotten or forgiven.”
― Michael Korda
“My father fought on the side of the Central Powers, as a soldier in the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army, my maternal grandfather fought in the British Army, on different sides, and both were so traumatized by the experience that they never talked about it.”
― Michael Korda
“I once attended a birthday party where Danny Kaye dropped in to entertain the birthday boy and his guests; I was sometimes taken for lunch on Saturdays by my father to The Brown Derby; and my favorite meal is still the Cobb salad in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“When my elders mentioned ‘The War,’ they invariably meant that of 1914-1918, even after 1939, for the Second World War was merely the continuation of the first, ‘an armistice of 20 years,’ as Marshal Foch had accurately predicted at the Versailles Peace Conference, with some changes of side.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“I have an admiration for Mr. Eastwood that borders on the kind that I have for the Grand Canyon. Like it, he is craggy, worn, awesomely impressive and unique, a living four-star tourist attraction that, in the formulaic words of the Guide Michelin, ‘vaut le voyage.’”
― Michael Korda
“Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one’s origins and one’s final achievement.”
― Michael Korda
“The purely agitation attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.”
― Michael Korda
“When I was a child in England before the war, Christmas pudding always contained at least one shiny new sixpence, and it was considered a sign of great good luck for the new year to find one in your helping of the pudding.”
― Michael Korda
“The French consider themselves the guardians of the world’s culture and do not bother to hide the fact, which is annoying, but Paris is still where good Americans want to go when they die – and Brits, Russians, and Chinese as well, these days.”
― Michael Korda
“Citizens of Rome might boast that the claim of ‘Civus romanus sum’ set them apart from barbarians and slaves, and it was true up to a point, but Roman citizens lived in a society that accepted pain, cruelty, and torture as the norm, and in which there was no suggestion of equality at birth or mercy in the afterlife.”
― Michael Korda
“It’s one thing to be writing in South or Latin America, where, except for Brazil, every country, however small and hard to find on a map, speaks Spanish, but quite another to be writing in, say, Hungary, a landlocked nation of 10 million people, with a language that very few people outside Hungary can read or speak.”
― Michael Korda
“About once a decade, it becomes necessary to remind Americans again that Ulysses S. Grant was a great man, indeed a giant figure. The usual way to try to do this is by publishing a thumping big biography, and let me say that there is nothing wrong with this, although it still hasn’t worked.”
― Michael Korda
“To be scrupulously honest, I only met Noel Coward twice in my life, and then briefly, but I heard so much about him at home when I was growing up that I always felt I knew him well.”
― Michael Korda
“Even almost a century after her death, Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress whose extraordinary personality, flamboyant life and passionate nature became a legend in her own lifetime, remains the byword among most people as the supreme theatrical star.”
― Michael Korda
“An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars – or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“Indeed, it is measure of how little we know about Cleopatra that the only images of her are either the coins she struck, bearing very unflattering official portraits of her, or some doubtful busts, which may be of other women imitating her coiffure.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you’re playing by somebody else’s rules, while quietly playing by your own.”
― Michael Korda
“What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.”
― Michael Korda
“Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.”
― Michael Korda
“The more you can dream, the more you can do.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.”
― Michael Korda
“The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work supremely well, without attending to appearance.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed.”
― Michael Korda
“An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“Curiosity is the best motive for writing: curiosity about the world at large, or about oneself.”
― 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.”
― Michael Korda
“Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“My books are based on observing others, not myself.”
― Michael Korda
“I always thought of myself as a kind of literary bureaucrat. And that was never going to be enough for me.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“I’m a relatively unfocused person.”
― Michael Korda
“I came into book publishing without any particular impulse to be in book publishing.”
― Michael Korda
“I’d fought in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, having left Oxford to do so.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“I don’t give plots to Harold Robbins or Graham Greene, because they don’t need them, but a lot of authors do.”
― Michael Korda
“I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“The big bestsellers aren’t being created by Barnes & Noble.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“The bestseller list is the tip of the iceberg.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“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!”
― Michael Korda
“Nobody understood how to use television for his own purposes better than Nixon, despite his poor showing against John F. Kennedy in the televised presidential debate.”
― Michael Korda
“Nixon knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish in his four interviews with David Frost, quite apart from having his agent Irving Paul Lazar negotiate a terrific deal for him, with cash up front.”
― Michael Korda
“Patton’s personality was a complex one – he was obsessed with glory, but behind the ivory-hilted pistols, the egomania, the forbidding scowl, and the rows of ribbons, there was a much more ambiguous figure.”
― Michael Korda
“There are people to whom heroism under fire comes naturally and seemingly without effort, but Patton was not one of them.”
― Michael Korda
“It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write ‘the Great American Novel,’ that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“We, in America and Great Britain, have never had to live with evil and ignore it, or pretend it wasn’t happening, as people did all over Europe, and indeed, even in Germany herself.”
― Michael Korda
“The huge, turgid work of history, sinking under the weight of its own ‘politically correct’ thesis and its foot- and source notes, is not the British way of writing history, and never has been.”
― Michael Korda
“Many years ago, I had the pleasure of editing a book by Joan Crawford, who, like Norma Desmond, was still a big star; it was just the movies that had gotten smaller.”
― Michael Korda
“The relationship between stars and their fans is always ambivalent and often highly charged with contradictory and ambivalent emotions, of which the most powerful is need.”
― Michael Korda
“The real fans do not just admire the star of their choice, they identify with him or her, while the star, unlike Joan Crawford, comes to need the fans’ love, admiration, and constant interest.”
― Michael Korda
“Nobody could emerge from a childhood at MGM unscathed.”
― Michael Korda
“It is hard to celebrate the past in an ecumenical way, or even in a fair-minded one, apparently. The trouble with the past is not just that it’s behind us, it’s that it is not even over yet.”
― Michael Korda
“The men who died at D-Day did not die shoulder-to-shoulder with their French comrades. They died to liberate the French from a sinister and brutal occupation.”
― Michael Korda
“I did meet Sen. Robert Kennedy, and it taught me something about political charisma.”
― Michael Korda
“From time to time, one imagined Bill Clinton had charisma, but it never really was more than an occasional false glare.”
― Michael Korda
“Ronald Reagan had a kind of shallow movie-star charisma – a combination of makeup and the skill of a good actor – but it wasn’t the real thing, and was something that he could turn off when the cameras weren’t running.”
― Michael Korda
“The normal reaction of a publisher when faced with an author with a bee in his bonnet is to grab the check and run.”
― Michael Korda
“I only met Ian Fleming once, at a party given by my father’s friend the director Carol Reed, at his house at 211 King’s Road, Chelsea, the garden of which he shared with Peter Ustinov.”
― Michael Korda
“Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them – he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton – and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.”
― Michael Korda
“For a brief moment, Ian Fleming made being an Englishman seem sexy, even to the French. He should have been awarded a knighthood, even possibly the Garter.”
― Michael Korda
“When the Second World War came to an end in Europe, my uncle Sir Alexander Korda was the first filmmaker to reopen offices in Germany and Austria.”
― Michael Korda
“Those of us who have not had the experience of being invaded by the Germans are in no position to criticize those who accommodated themselves to German occupation, with its ferocious punishments for those who expressed even the mildest opposition.”
― Michael Korda
“’Il faut vivre’ might almost be the French national motto from 1940 to June 1944, but who is to say ours would have been any different if the Germans had paraded victoriously through London and Generalfeldmarschall Von Runstedt made his headquarters at Claridge’s?”
― Michael Korda
“Chanel took women out of corsets and put them into the ‘simple little black dress,’ the perfectly tailored suit, the bell-bottom sailor pants, and jersey tops.”
― Michael Korda
“Few things are more painful than being a successful writer born in a small country with an impenetrable language.”
― Michael Korda
“It is curious that the two best-known British historians in the United States are Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson, each of whom represents, in fact, a different school of serious historical writing, and both of whom seem to have gained for themselves, perhaps without intending to, a special reputation on the American right.”
― Michael Korda
“T. E. Lawrence was far more than a glamorous, swashbuckling, heroic figure in flowing robes mounted on a camel, leading the Arab tribes against the Turks in World War One.”
― Michael Korda
“It is not necessary to agree with the Arab point of view about their own history, but it is foolish to ignore it.”
― Michael Korda
“Some people are so famous that the legends about them and the cultural aftermath of their life altogether obscure the real human being.”
― Michael Korda
“Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.”
― Michael Korda
“In 1918, Germany suffered the ghastly consequences of defeat; France suffered those of victory, the price of which was to divide and embitter French politics and culture and lead to its defeat in 1940.”
― Michael Korda
“There are no French Puritans.”
― Michael Korda
“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.”
― Michael Korda
“When someone has spent a lifetime trying to survive a death sentence, the last thing you want is your children uncovering what you have been at such pains to conceal.”
― Michael Korda
“While politicians may be forgiven for failing to predict the future – who can, alas? – it is amazing that they defiantly ignore the past.”
― Michael Korda
“In the Roman world, and in the worlds around it that Romans sought to subdue and control, the gods were merciless, frivolous, prone to set traps for humans, and largely indifferent to the unprivileged bulk of humankind, who in any case did not expect their fate in the afterworld to be any better than it had been on earth.”
― Michael Korda
“I attended first a military academy, then a public school in Beverly Hills, where we lived, and many of my classmates were the children of movie stars and studio executives.”
― Michael Korda
“If your family was part of the movie business, then watching ‘Moguls & Movie Stars’ is like looking at the family photo album: hilarious to members of the family, numbingly boring to those outside the family circle.”
― Michael Korda
“The studio moguls were certainly bigger-than-life figures, but they were also tough and unforgiving street fighters to a man, redeemed only because they were also the butt of so many Hollywood jokes.”
― Michael Korda
“Nothing is more difficult than to recreate in all its complexity than a distant age, and not only to get it right but make it seem fresh and relevant.”
― Michael Korda
“In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or ‘The Great War,’ as it was called until 1939.”
― Michael Korda
“Speaking as somebody who is half English and half Hungarian, World War I still seems to me a familiar and seismic event, as if it had only just ended.”
― Michael Korda
“Prime ministers come and go, but so long as he or she lives, the sovereign remains, receiving and reading all state papers and meeting once a week with the prime minister to advise, enquire, and comment – sometimes sharply, as was the case with Queen Elizabeth II and Mrs. Thatcher – on affairs of state.”
― Michael Korda
“My father and his brothers never mentioned to their English wives and children that they were Jewish. Being Hungarian was exotic and foreign enough to begin with, and so long as they were not asked, they found it easier, from 1919 on, to let the matter drop.”
― Michael Korda
“The first thing to be said about ‘Prague Winter,’ former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s new book, is that she very wisely chooses to confront early on in it her apparent surprise at learning late in life that she was born Jewish.”
― Michael Korda
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