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

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

Not Good Enough

" I came into book publishing without any particular impulse to be in book publishing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There are people to whom heroism under fire comes naturally and seemingly without effort, but Patton was not one of them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "