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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Michael Korda

Failure

Best

Happiness

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life. "

" 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. "

" Nothing in the Middle East is ever forgotten or forgiven. "

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

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

" Even almost a century after her death, Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress whose extraordinary personality, flamboyant life and passionate nature became a legend in her own lifetime, remains the byword among most people as the supreme theatrical star. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Nobody could emerge from a childhood at MGM unscathed. "

" The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble. "

" Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers. "

" '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? "

" In 'Gran Torino,' Eastwood moves towards the climax of the movie not by staging a shoot-out, but by putting his weapons to one side and confronting the bad guys armed only with a cigarette lighter, guessing that as he reaches for it they will think he's drawing a pistol. "

" 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. "

" When the Second World War came to an end in Europe, my uncle Sir Alexander Korda was the first filmmaker to reopen offices in Germany and Austria. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Success was always critical to me. What it meant was winning enough praise and external admiration that I could feel myself to be a logical extension of my Uncle Alex, Uncle Zoli, and my father, in that order. "

" I'm a relatively unfocused person. "

Michael Korda

Person

Relatively

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

" In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or 'The Great War,' as it was called until 1939. "

" 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. "

" I come from a family that was very strong, very successful, very bizarre, and terrifically exciting. Being a Korda is something I regard as special - not wonderful, or worthy of a national monument, but special. "