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" 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. "

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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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The bestseller list is the tip of the iceberg. "

Tip Of The Iceberg

" 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 fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own. "

" Frost was no match for Nixon - far from being an intrepid and challenging interviewer, he was a pushover for the great and the famous, always deeply impressed with the fact that here he was, David Frost, putting questions to - Richard Nixon! "

" If you don't believe in yourself, then who will believe in you? The next man's way of getting there might not necessarily work for me, so I have to create my own ways of getting there. "

Believe In Yourself

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 never met Peter O'Toole, but he one was of those rare actors whose success was defined by a single role. His incandescent performance in David Lean's 'Lawrence of Arabia' is one that nobody who saw it will ever forget. "

" The pleasure lies not in the cookies, but in the pattern the crumbs make when the cookies crumble. "

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

" If you're a retailer and know that once a year you're going to get Mary Higgins Clark's book on a given date, you're going to have an awful lot of copies out there in time for that. You'd have to be simple-minded not to do that - although bookselling prior to 1950 never made that connection. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I once attended a birthday party where Danny Kaye dropped in to entertain the birthday boy and his guests; I was sometimes taken for lunch on Saturdays by my father to The Brown Derby; and my favorite meal is still the Cobb salad in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The rich and famous expect to get a lot for their story, whether they are writing it themselves or not. It's not that they need the money, of course; it's a question of ego, like catching the biggest fish. "

" 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. "