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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Michael Korda Quotes

We British and Americans have never been conquered and occupied by the Germans, or forced to make the choice between defiance and collaboration, or haunted by the choices, evasions and moral ambiguities that only a defeated and occupied country can feel.

– 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

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

– Michael Korda

The men who died at D-Day did not die shoulder-to-shoulder with their French comrades. They died to liberate the French from a sinister and brutal occupation.

– Michael Korda

It’s often said that everybody has a story to tell, and I suppose that’s true, but the problem is that most of them aren’t worth telling.

– Michael Korda

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.

– Michael Korda

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.

– 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

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

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

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

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

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

The bestseller list is the tip of the iceberg.

– Michael Korda

‘Il faut vivre’ might almost be the French national motto from 1940 to June 1944, but who is to say ours would have been any different if the Germans had paraded victoriously through London and Generalfeldmarschall Von Runstedt made his headquarters at Claridge’s?

– Michael Korda

I’m a relatively unfocused person.

– 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

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

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

– Michael Korda

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

The big bestsellers aren’t being created by Barnes & Noble.

– Michael Korda

In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or ‘The Great War,’ as it was called until 1939.

– Michael Korda

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.’

– Michael Korda

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

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

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.

– Michael Korda

Nobody understood how to use television for his own purposes better than Nixon, despite his poor showing against John F. Kennedy in the televised presidential debate.

– Michael Korda

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.

– Michael Korda

What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.

– 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

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