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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Nothing in the Middle East is ever forgotten or forgiven.”

“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.”