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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Michael Korda

Successful

Strong

Special

" 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. "

" Chanel took women out of corsets and put them into the 'simple little black dress,' the perfectly tailored suit, the bell-bottom sailor pants, and jersey tops. "

" We, in America and Great Britain, have never had to live with evil and ignore it, or pretend it wasn't happening, as people did all over Europe, and indeed, even in Germany herself. "

" 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. "

" In 1918, Germany suffered the ghastly consequences of defeat; France suffered those of victory, the price of which was to divide and embitter French politics and culture and lead to its defeat in 1940. "

" 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. "

" Surrounded by high-paid publicity people and professional ego massagers, movie stars, like politicians, almost invariably come to believe that they are nicer, more charming, and more beloved than they appear to be to a casual observer, and that their stories about their careers are universally fascinating. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" There used to be a strong belief that if you wanted to know what was really going on in a country, the best thing to do was to go there and ask a taxi driver. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

" 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. "

" Some people are so famous that the legends about them and the cultural aftermath of their life altogether obscure the real human being. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

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

" I'm a relatively unfocused person. "

Michael Korda

Person

Relatively

" 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

" An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition. "

" About once a decade, it becomes necessary to remind Americans again that Ulysses S. Grant was a great man, indeed a giant figure. The usual way to try to do this is by publishing a thumping big biography, and let me say that there is nothing wrong with this, although it still hasn't worked. "

Michael Korda

Great

Nothing

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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