Michael Korda Quotes

If your position is everywhere, your momentum is zero.

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

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

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

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

Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.

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.

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

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

My books are based on observing others, not myself.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I'm a relatively unfocused person.

What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition.

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

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

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

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