Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" For a brief moment, Ian Fleming made being an Englishman seem sexy, even to the French. He should have been awarded a knighthood, even possibly the Garter. "
Michael Korda
He
Been
Seem
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Life
Growing Up
Growing
" I always thought of myself as a kind of literary bureaucrat. And that was never going to be enough for me. "
Michael Korda
Me
Thought
Never
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Great
White
Ambition
" The purely agitation attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject. "
Michael Korda
Attitude
Not Good Enough
Enough
" I don't give plots to Harold Robbins or Graham Greene, because they don't need them, but a lot of authors do. "
Michael Korda
Them
Authors
Because
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Work
Us
Got
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Need
Star
Real
" From time to time, one imagined Bill Clinton had charisma, but it never really was more than an occasional false glare. "
Michael Korda
Than
Never
False
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Want
Time
Crisis
" I'd fought in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, having left Oxford to do so. "
Michael Korda
Having
Revolution
Oxford
" The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own. "
Michael Korda
Rules
You
Own
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Army
Father
Grandfather
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Long
Matter
Children
" Curiosity is the best motive for writing: curiosity about the world at large, or about oneself. "
Michael Korda
Writing
Best
Curiosity
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Children
Classmates
School
" Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers. "
Michael Korda
Readers
Numbers
Correspond
" Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them - he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton - and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement. "
Michael Korda
Film
Design
Detail
" Hebron is a bone of contention between Israeli settlers and the Palestinians in part because Abraham is buried there, in the Tomb of the Patriarchs. "
Michael Korda
Abraham
Because
Bone
" The normal reaction of a publisher when faced with an author with a bee in his bonnet is to grab the check and run. "
Michael Korda
Run
Reaction
Bee
" 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. "
Michael Korda
More
Glamorous
Far
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Behind
Glory
Much
" The bestseller list is the tip of the iceberg. "
Michael Korda
List
Iceberg
Tip Of The Iceberg
" Prime ministers come and go, but so long as he or she lives, the sovereign remains, receiving and reading all state papers and meeting once a week with the prime minister to advise, enquire, and comment - sometimes sharply, as was the case with Queen Elizabeth II and Mrs. Thatcher - on affairs of state. "
Michael Korda
Long
Queen
Reading
" Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement. "
Michael Korda
Achievement
Success
Distance
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Fresh
Nothing
Age
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Men
Who
Brutal
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Freedom
Failure
You
" In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or 'The Great War,' as it was called until 1939. "
Michael Korda
Great
World War I
World
" 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. "
Michael Korda
Measure
She
Only
" 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.' "
Michael Korda
Unique
Words
Grand Canyon