Quotes from Michael Korda

Across some of the harshest and most difficult terrain in the world, led by a man who already had a price on his head.

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

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat." He had an instinctive understanding of the fact that the British as a people dislike boasting, and pride themselves not on victory but on being able to "take it.

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.

Writers are always outsiders and probably ought to be, since only outsiders see things clearly: the people who publish them, or make movies, or produce plays are always richer and more powerful, however successful the writer is.

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.

Lawrence: A man who gives himself to the possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life. In my case my effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes, and destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only.

Lawrence's concern about the loss of twenty Arabs may seem odd during a war in which British war dead would exceed 750,000, but he felt strongly that "Our men were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting in our leadership.

deemed correct, the student was

My father, Vincent, a rumpled Bohemian who had followed his

Like any man who has two masters with opposing interests, he was torn between them.

It is a reflection of a well-known social problem during the Victorian age, when female servants were often made pregnant by the master of the house or one of his sons.

in combat, a pilot had to yank on his control stick with all his strength if he wanted to survive, and stamp his heavy, thick-soled flying boots mercilessly on the rudder pedals with his full weight as if he were kicking somebody on the floor in a life-or-death barroom brawl. In any case, hands and feet were too cold and cramped for gentle movement. The temperature at 25,000 feet was thirty degrees below zero, and the cockpits of the fighters weren't heated

Almost the first thing I learned about being an editor was that it was hard work. To be sure, ditchdiggers and miners have it worse, but for sheer, numbing, endless (I do not, deliberately, say mindless) work, editing books is hard to beat.

It was soul-destroying work, apt to turn anyone cynical, for the sad, awful truth was that there was hardly any evidence at all of talent in the slush pile and plenty of proof, for those who needed it, that the country was full of crazy people armed with typewriters—far more of them even than of crazy people armed with guns.

And like all the better professions, editing is something of an art, too, if it's done well, and something of a mystery as well. Nobody teaches it, of course; you're born to it, the way a good surgeon is born with the right hands; it's something you either can or can't do, though apprenticeship doesn't hurt.

the United States has no business transforming itself into "an occupying power in a seething Arab world,"12 still good advice; and that if we should ever do so, "I am sure we would regret it." The length, detail, and meticulous

No matter how peaceful a situation might seem, you could never be protected from sudden, unexpected violence that might also engulf the stranger.