Michael Korda Quotes

Author Image

Michael Korda

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 8, 1933

My books are based on observing others, not myself.

Michael Korda

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

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

I came into book publishing without any particular impulse to be in book publishing.

Michael Korda

I am a stupendously fast reader and always have been. I can read in at least three languages fluently and two languages with a little bit more difficulty.

Michael Korda

In my experience, with very few exceptions - I am, as it happens, one of the exceptions - the one thing that most editors don't want to do is edit. It's not nearly as conducive to a successful career as having lunch out with important agents or going to meetings where you get noticed.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

I don't give plots to Harold Robbins or Graham Greene, because they don't need them, but a lot of authors do.

Michael Korda

Success was always critical to me. What it meant was winning enough praise and external admiration that I could feel myself to be a logical extension of my Uncle Alex, Uncle Zoli, and my father, in that order.

Michael Korda

The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble.

Michael Korda

If you're a retailer and know that once a year you're going to get Mary Higgins Clark's book on a given date, you're going to have an awful lot of copies out there in time for that. You'd have to be simple-minded not to do that - although bookselling prior to 1950 never made that connection.

Michael Korda

The bestseller list is the tip of the iceberg.

Michael Korda

Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars - or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

For a book publisher, there is hardly a more dangerous category than that of celebrity autobiography. Forget who it's by, most books of this kind not only fail but fail big, since they are invariably expensive.

Michael Korda

The rich and famous expect to get a lot for their story, whether they are writing it themselves or not. It's not that they need the money, of course; it's a question of ego, like catching the biggest fish.

Michael Korda

It's often said that everybody has a story to tell, and I suppose that's true, but the problem is that most of them aren't worth telling.

Michael Korda

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.

Michael Korda

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!

Michael Korda