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

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" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Speaking as somebody who is half English and half Hungarian, World War I still seems to me a familiar and seismic event, as if it had only just ended. "

" 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 father and his brothers never mentioned to their English wives and children that they were Jewish. Being Hungarian was exotic and foreign enough to begin with, and so long as they were not asked, they found it easier, from 1919 on, to let the matter drop. "

" 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. "

" An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition. "

" It's often said that everybody has a story to tell, and I suppose that's true, but the problem is that most of them aren't worth telling. "

" Those of us who have not had the experience of being invaded by the Germans are in no position to criticize those who accommodated themselves to German occupation, with its ferocious punishments for those who expressed even the mildest opposition. "

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

" 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. "

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

" The studio moguls were certainly bigger-than-life figures, but they were also tough and unforgiving street fighters to a man, redeemed only because they were also the butt of so many Hollywood jokes. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I am a stupendously fast reader and always have been. I can read in at least three languages fluently and two languages with a little bit more difficulty. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Indeed, it is measure of how little we know about Cleopatra that the only images of her are either the coins she struck, bearing very unflattering official portraits of her, or some doubtful busts, which may be of other women imitating her coiffure. "

" I only met Ian Fleming once, at a party given by my father's friend the director Carol Reed, at his house at 211 King's Road, Chelsea, the garden of which he shared with Peter Ustinov. "