Michael Korda quotes

Years of standing in the limelight portraying other people for large amounts of money does not usually lead to a high degree of self-examination, let alone self-criticism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Citizens of Rome might boast that the claim of 'Civus romanus sum' set them apart from barbarians and slaves, and it was true up to a point, but Roman citizens lived in a society that accepted pain, cruelty, and torture as the norm, and in which there was no suggestion of equality at birth or mercy in the afterlife.

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.

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

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

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

While politicians may be forgiven for failing to predict the future - who can, alas? - it is amazing that they defiantly ignore the past.

The purely agitation attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.