Michael Korda Quotes

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

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.

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!

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.

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

It must be nice, Queenie thought, to be one thing or another, to know where you belonged.

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

Cats don't think they're owned by anybody.
Even behind doors and windows, like amiable Wally, they're free. Always.
That may, in fact, be the most important thing about them.

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

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.

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.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

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.

An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition.

I'm a relatively unfocused person.

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.

We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. - Irving Townshend, Separate Lives

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

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

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

What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.

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

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

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.

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.

Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.

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

Even those who die in terrorist attacks, and have thus had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, are described as "heroes", though given a choice most of them would no doubt have preferred to be somewhere else when the blow was struck.

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

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.