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" 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

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

" My books are based on observing others, not myself. "

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

" 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 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. "

" Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject. "

" 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. "

Michael Korda

People

Always

" 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. "

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

" The more you can dream, the more you can do. "

" I don't give plots to Harold Robbins or Graham Greene, because they don't need them, but a lot of authors do. "

" 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. "

" 'Il faut vivre' might almost be the French national motto from 1940 to June 1944, but who is to say ours would have been any different if the Germans had paraded victoriously through London and Generalfeldmarschall Von Runstedt made his headquarters at Claridge's? "

" 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. "

" Ronald Reagan had a kind of shallow movie-star charisma - a combination of makeup and the skill of a good actor - but it wasn't the real thing, and was something that he could turn off when the cameras weren't running. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" From time to time, one imagined Bill Clinton had charisma, but it never really was more than an occasional false glare. "

" 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

Been

Seem

" I did meet Sen. Robert Kennedy, and it taught me something about political charisma. "

Michael Korda

Political

Meet

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Michael Korda

Event

Only

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

" 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. "

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

Michael Korda

Thought

Never

" What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe. "