About Michael Korda: Michael Korda is an English-born writer and novelist who was editor-in-Chief of Simon & Schuster in New York City.
The freedom to fail is vital if you're going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.
The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own.
The more you can dream, the more you can do.
Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.
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.
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.
To have a childhood surrounded by people like Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh sounds glitzy, but for years I wanted to repress it. I couldn't take that kind of power and success.
Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility... in the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have... is the ability to take on responsibility.
Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.
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 n...
Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement.
I never met Peter O'Toole, but he one was of those rare actors whose success was defined by a single role. His incandescent performance in David Lean's 'Lawrence of Arabia' is one that nobody who saw it will ever forget.
One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.
Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed.
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.
The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work supremely well, without attending to appearance.
