Michael Korda
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.Collection: Learning
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.Collection: Work
The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Equality
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.Collection: Christmas
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.Collection: Strength
One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Failure
Some people are so famous that the legends about them and the cultural aftermath of their life altogether obscure the real human being.Collection: Famous
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.Collection: Birthday
The more you can dream, the more you can do.Collection: Dreams
The purely agitation attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.Collection: Attitude
Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.Collection: Failure
In Eastern Europe, the past is not only always hovering over the present, it is not even passed. It waits, like some malevolent caged beast, ready at any moment to escape and bring back all the horrors.
An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.
The pleasure lies not in the cookies, but in the pattern the crumbs make when the cookies crumble.
An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition.
In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or 'The Great War,' as it was called until 1939.
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.
Curiosity is the best motive for writing: curiosity about the world at large, or about oneself.
Never reveal all of yourself to other people; hold back something in reserve so that people are never quite sure if they really know you.
While politicians may be forgiven for failing to predict the future - who can, alas? - it is amazing that they defiantly ignore the past.
I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.
Nothing in the Middle East is ever forgotten or forgiven.
To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.
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.
Nixon knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish in his four interviews with David Frost, quite apart from having his agent Irving Paul Lazar negotiate a terrific deal for him, with cash up front.
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.
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.
What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.
Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement.
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.
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.
Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
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.
The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work supremely well, without attending to appearance.
Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.
Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.
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.
My books are based on observing others, not myself.
I always thought of myself as a kind of literary bureaucrat. And that was never going to be enough for me.
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.
I'm a relatively unfocused person.
I came into book publishing without any particular impulse to be in book publishing.