MICHAEL KORDA

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.

My books are based on observing others, not myself.

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

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.

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 never catch.

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

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.

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

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.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

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.

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.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

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

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.

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

Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.

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 more you can dream, the more you can do.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm a relatively unfocused person.