Michael Korda

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

“Citizens of Rome might boast that the claim of 'Civus romanus sum' set them apart from barbarians and slaves, and it was true up to a point, but Roman citizens lived in a society that accepted pain, cruelty, and torture as the norm, and in which there was no suggestion of equality at birth or mercy in the afterlife.”

“Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them - he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton - and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.”

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

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

“Act impeccably! Perform every act as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered.”

“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.”

“Learn to use time, think of it as a friend, not an enemy. Don't waste it in going after things you don't want.”

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

“Learn to accept your mistakes. Don't be a perfectionist about everything.”

“Don't make waves, move smoothly without disturbing things.”

“•\xa0It's O.K. to be ambitious. A word of caution: people will tell you that success can't buy you happiness. This is true enough, but 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.”

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

“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.”

“Remember: never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully — and imaginatively — for its hidden assets.”

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

“The first step to success is to accept the consequences of knowing that you're right, when that is the case. It is not so much a matter of being assertive, as of giving up the comfortable cocoon of apologies and guilt in which most of us have chosen to live.”

“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.”

“In America, success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement that matters.”

“This is true enough, but 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.”

“I once attended a birthday party where Danny Kaye dropped in to entertain the birthday boy and his guests; I was sometimes taken for lunch on Saturdays by my father to The Brown Derby; and my favorite meal is still the Cobb salad in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

“The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own.”

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

“Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them - he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton - and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.”

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