Michael Korda Quotes & Sayings

We sell books, other people sell shoes. What's the difference? Publishing isn't the highest art. — Michael Korda

Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement. — 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

I'm a relatively unfocused person. — Michael Korda

What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe. — Michael Korda

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

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

Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers. — Michael Korda

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

Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully for its hidden assets. — Michael Korda

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life. — Michael Korda

The image you project, in many circumstances, is far more valuable than your skills or your record of past accomplishments. — Michael Korda

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

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

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

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. — Michael Korda

My books are based on observing others, not myself. — Michael Korda

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. — Michael Korda

Write it down. Written goals have a way of transforming wishes into wants; cant's into cans; dreams into plans; and plans into reality. Don't just think it - ink it! — Michael Korda

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition. — Michael Korda

You need your strength and you need as much support from family, friends, and loved ones as you can get. — Michael Korda

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more. — 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

Ask a book publisher how many copies a book has sold, and he or she, presuming you're not the author, will probably try to remember the size of the first printing, then double it. If you're the author, the publisher will try to remember the number of copies that were shipped and cut that in half in order to avoid encouraging you to expect a big royalty check. — Michael Korda

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

Cats don't think they're owned by anybody.
Even behind doors and windows, like amiable Wally, they're free. Always.
That may, in fact, be the most important thing about them. — Michael Korda

It must be nice, Queenie thought, to be one thing or another, to know where you belonged. — Michael Korda

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

Even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don't want to read. — Michael Korda

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. — Michael Korda

Concentration is the magic key that opens the door to accomplishment. By concentrating our efforts upon a few major goals, our efficiency soars, our projects are completed we are going somewhere. — Michael Korda

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. — 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

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

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

Even those who die in terrorist attacks, and have thus had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, are described as "heroes", though given a choice most of them would no doubt have preferred to be somewhere else when the blow was struck. — Michael Korda

If your position is everywhere, your momentum is zero. — 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

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

An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition. — Michael Korda

Lee was a born pedagogue, never happier than when his children were learning to do something the right way. It is a testament to Lee's affection and patience that his children did not rebel. In fact, they appear to have thrived. — Michael Korda

The first rule of success, and the one that supersedes all others, is to have energy. It is important to know how to concentrate it, how to husband it, how to focus it on important things instead of frittering it away on trivia. — Michael Korda

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

We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. - Irving Townshend, Separate Lives — Michael Korda

The more you can dream, the more you can do. — Michael Korda

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

Male chauvinism is ... a shrewd method of extracting the maximum of work for the minimum of compensation. — Michael Korda