Top 60 Michael Korda Quotes

While politicians may be forgiven for failing to predict the future – who can, alas? – it is amazing that they defiantly ignore the past.

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.

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

There are no French Puritans.

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.

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.

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.

The normal reaction of a publisher when faced with an author with a bee in his bonnet is to grab the check and run.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Few things are more painful than being a successful writer born in a small country with an impenetrable language.

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.

It is not necessary to agree with the Arab point of view about their own history, but it is foolish to ignore it.

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.

My books are based on observing others, not myself.

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.

Some people are so famous that the legends about them and the cultural aftermath of their life altogether obscure the real human being.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.