Michael Korda Quotations

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.

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

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

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

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

Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.

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

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

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.

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.

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

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

My books are based on observing others, not myself.

Very well observed and touching story, wonderful eye for detail and a pleasure to read,

An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition.

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.

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

We sell books, other people sell shoes. What's the difference? Publishing isn't the highest art.

The American system demands success, and in order to succeed we must first believe that we can. Yet our society, with its intolerance of failure and poverty, traps millions of people in positions where any kind of success seems impossible to contemplate, and in which failure itself is a kind of passive rebellion against their own misery and the social system which created it in the first place.To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.

Even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don't want to read.

The first rule of success, and the one that supersedes all others, is to have energy. It is important to know how to concentrate it, how to husband it, how to focus it on important things instead of frittering it away on trivia.

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more.

If your position is everywhere, your momentum is zero.

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

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.

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

To succeed, we must first believe that we can.

An once of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Male chauvinism is . . . a shrewd method of extracting the maximum of work for the minimum of compensation.

The image you project, in many circumstances, is far more valuable than your skills or your record of past accomplishments.

You need your strength and you need as much support from family, friends, and loved ones as you can get.

Concentration is the magic key that opens the door to accomplishment.

Gossip, unlike river water, flows both ways.

Concentration is the magic key that opens the door to accomplishment. By concentrating our efforts upon a few major goals, our efficiency soars, our projects are completed we are going somewhere.

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.

Write it down. Written goals have a way of transforming wishes into wants; cant's into cans; dreams into plans; and plans into reality. Don't just think it - ink it!

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