Michael Korda

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

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.

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.

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.