Michael Korda

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Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them — he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton — and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.

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The normal reaction of a publisher when faced with an author with a bee in his bonnet is to grab the check and run.

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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.

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I come from a family that was very strong, very successful, very bizarre, and terrifically exciting. Being a Korda is something I regard as special — not wonderful, or worthy of a national monument, but special.

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An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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There are people to whom heroism under fire comes naturally and seemingly without effort, but Patton was not one of them.

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

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