In the Roman world, and in the worlds around it that Romans sought to subdue and control, the gods were merciless, frivolous, prone to set traps for humans, and largely indifferent to the unprivileged bulk of humankind, who in any case did not expect their fate in the afterworld to be any better than it had been on earth.

Michael Korda

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

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.

Michael Korda

Work Yourself Yours

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

Michael Korda

Work World Without

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

Michael Korda

T Sure Rum

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.

Michael Korda

Time Success Strength

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

Michael Korda

Dreams You T

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Michael Korda

Worth UN T

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Michael Korda

Life Art Thing

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.

Michael Korda

Success You Take

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

Michael Korda

Business Your You

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.

Michael Korda

Yourself Yours Your

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

Michael Korda

World T Succeed

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.

Michael Korda

Work Success Chance

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.

Michael Korda

You Wanted Want

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.

Michael Korda

Society Life Equality

Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.

Michael Korda

Mom Men Good

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.

Michael Korda

Time Birthday Art

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

Michael Korda

Failure Car Way

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.

Michael Korda

Success Happiness Failure

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.

Michael Korda

Movies Years Ago Years

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.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

Curiosity is the best motive for writing: curiosity about the world at large, or about oneself.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

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

Michael Korda

Nothing in the Middle East is ever forgotten or forgiven.

Michael Korda

Even almost a century after her death, Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress whose extraordinary personality, flamboyant life and passionate nature became a legend in her own lifetime, remains the byword among most people as the supreme theatrical star.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

It is curious that the two best-known British historians in the United States are Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson, each of whom represents, in fact, a different school of serious historical writing, and both of whom seem to have gained for themselves, perhaps without intending to, a special reputation on the American right.

Michael Korda

Ronald Reagan had a kind of shallow movie-star charisma - a combination of makeup and the skill of a good actor - but it wasn't the real thing, and was something that he could turn off when the cameras weren't running.

Michael Korda

The bestseller list is the tip of the iceberg.

Michael Korda

From time to time, one imagined Bill Clinton had charisma, but it never really was more than an occasional false glare.

Michael Korda

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

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.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

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

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.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

When someone has spent a lifetime trying to survive a death sentence, the last thing you want is your children uncovering what you have been at such pains to conceal.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

Few things are more painful than being a successful writer born in a small country with an impenetrable language.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

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

Michael Korda

In the Roman world, and in the worlds around it that Romans sought to subdue and control, the gods were merciless, frivolous, prone to set traps for humans, and largely indifferent to the unprivileged bulk of humankind, who in any case did not expect their fate in the afterworld to be any better than it had been on earth.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

I always thought of myself as a kind of literary bureaucrat. And that was never going to be enough for me.

Michael Korda

It is not necessary to agree with the Arab point of view about their own history, but it is foolish to ignore it.

Michael Korda