Quotes from Michael Korda

The studio moguls were certainly bigger-than-life figures, but they were also tough and unforgiving street fighters to a man, redeemed only because they were also the butt of so many Hollywood jokes.

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.

Frost was no match for Nixon - far from being an intrepid and challenging interviewer, he was a pushover for the great and the famous, always deeply impressed with the fact that here he was, David Frost, putting questions to - Richard Nixon!

Surrounded by high-paid publicity people and professional ego massagers, movie stars, like politicians, almost invariably come to believe that they are nicer, more charming, and more beloved than they appear to be to a casual observer, and that their stories about their careers are universally fascinating.

I do not start with a full knowledge of the facts; the whole attraction of writing history is to educate myself: it is an exploration into the unknown - 'a journey without maps,' to borrow Graham Greene's phrase.

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.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

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.

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

My books are based on observing others, not myself.

From time to time, one imagined Bill Clinton had charisma, but it never really was more than an occasional false glare.

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.

The real fans do not just admire the star of their choice, they identify with him or her, while the star, unlike Joan Crawford, comes to need the fans' love, admiration, and constant interest.

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.

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

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

About once a decade, it becomes necessary to remind Americans again that Ulysses S. Grant was a great man, indeed a giant figure. The usual way to try to do this is by publishing a thumping big biography, and let me say that there is nothing wrong with this, although it still hasn't worked.

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.

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.

Indeed, it is measure of how little we know about Cleopatra that the only images of her are either the coins she struck, bearing very unflattering official portraits of her, or some doubtful busts, which may be of other women imitating her coiffure.

Of course the rich and famous tend to have more going on in their lives than ordinary people, but they aren't always willing to tell the interesting bits.

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.

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

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