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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Michael Korda

Success

Myself

Live

" 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. "

" 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. "

Michael Korda

Mystery

Family

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

" 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. "

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

" For a book publisher, there is hardly a more dangerous category than that of celebrity autobiography. Forget who it's by, most books of this kind not only fail but fail big, since they are invariably expensive. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Got

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

" The first thing to be said about 'Prague Winter,' former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's new book, is that she very wisely chooses to confront early on in it her apparent surprise at learning late in life that she was born Jewish. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Michael Korda

Rise

Rise Above

" 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! "

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

" 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. "

" What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe. "

" 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

" It is hard to celebrate the past in an ecumenical way, or even in a fair-minded one, apparently. The trouble with the past is not just that it's behind us, it's that it is not even over yet. "

" 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

Glamorous

Far

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

Michael Korda

Political

Meet

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

" 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. "

" 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. "