Best 39 quotes of Michael Korda on MyQuotes

Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.

An once of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Concentration is the magic key that opens the door to accomplishment. By concentrating our efforts upon a few major goals, our efficiency soars, our projects are completed -- we are going somewhere. By focusing our efforts to a single point, we achieve the greatest results. The first rule of success, and the one that supercedes all others, is to have energy. It is important to know how to concentrate it, how to husband it, how to focus it on important things instead of frittering it away on trivia.

Concentration is the magic key that opens the door to accomplishment. By concentrating our efforts upon a few major goals, our efficiency soars, our projects are completed we are going somewhere.

Concentration is the magic key that opens the door to accomplishment.

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

Even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don't want to read.

Gossip, unlike river water, flows both ways.

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.

If your position is everywhere, your momentum is zero.

Luck can often mean simple taking advantage of a situation at the right moment, It is possible to make your luck by being always prepared.

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

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

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.

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

Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.

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.

One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.

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

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.

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.

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more.

The American system demands success, and in order to succeed we must first believe that we can. Yet our society, with its intolerance of failure and poverty, traps millions of people in positions where any kind of success seems impossible to contemplate, and in which failure itself is a kind of passive rebellion against their own misery and the social system which created it in the first place. To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.

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

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 first rule of success, and the one that supersedes all others, is to have energy. It is important to know how to concentrate it, how to husband it, how to focus it on important things instead of frittering it away on trivia.

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 image you project, in many circumstances, is far more valuable than your skills or your record of past accomplishments.

The more you can dream, the more you can do.

To succeed, we must first believe that we can.

To succeed, it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.

We sell books, other people sell shoes. What's the difference? Publishing isn't the highest art.

What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.

Write it down. Written goals have a way of transforming wishes into wants; cant's into cans; dreams into plans; and plans into reality. Don't just think it - ink it!

You need your strength and you need as much support from family, friends, and loved ones as you can get.

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.

Cats don't think they're owned by anybody. Even behind doors and windows, like amiable Wally, they're free. Always. That may, in fact, be the most important thing about them.

Escapism sold books, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were sold by exposing America’s flaws and making the average American reader (and book club member) look closely at his or her most cherished social assumptions. Americans might not be eager to accept integration, feminism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, and the drug culture– or to shoulder the blame for the existence of these problems– but they were certainly willing to read about them.

None of this means of course that Robert E. Lee wasn't influenced by his father, or didn't inherit some of his better characteristics. Like Henry Lee, Robert was tall, physically strong, a born horseman and soldier, and so courageous that even his own soldiers often begged him to get back out of range, in vain of course. He had his father's gift for the sudden flank attack that would throw the enemy off balance, and also his father's ability to inspire loyalty--and in Robert's case, virtual worship--in his men. On the other hand, perhaps because of Henry Lee's quarrels with Jefferson and Madison, Robert had an ingrained distrust of politics and politicians, including those of the Confederacy. But the most important trait that influenced Robert was a negative one: his father had been voluble, imprudent, fond of gossip, hot-tempered, and quick to attack anybody who offended or disagreed with him. With Henry Lee, even minor differences of opinions escalated quickly into public feuds. Robert was, or forced himself to be, exactly the opposite. He kept the firmest possible rein on his temper, he avoided personal confrontations of every kind, and he disliked arguments. These characteristics, normally thought of as virtues, became in fact Robert E. Lee's Achilles' heel, the one weak point in his otherwise admirable personality, and a dangerous flaw for a commander, perhaps even a flaw that would, in the end, prove fatal for the Confederacy. Some of the most mistaken military decisions in the short history of the Confederacy can be attributed to Lee's reluctance to confront a subordinate and have it out with him on the spot, face to face.