"An once of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition." -- Michael Korda
Michael Korda (born October 8, 1933, London, England, United Kingdom) is a novelist who was editor-in-Chief of Simon & Schuster in New York City.
He is the son of English actress Gertrude Musgrove and artist and film production designer Vincent Korda and the nephew of Hungarian-born film magnate Sir Alexander Korda and brother Zoltan. Michael Korda grew up in England but received part of his education in France where his father had worked with film director Marcel Pagnol. He was schooled at the private Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland and then studied at Oxford University. He served in the Royal Air Force.
While in his early twenties, he moved to New York City where he was employed by playwright Sidney Kingsley as a research assistant. In 1958 he joined the book publishing firm, Simon & Schuster, starting as an assistant editor, which included the task of reading "slush pile" manuscripts. He became Editor-in-Chief of the company and was a major figure in the book industry, publishing numerous works by high-profile writers and personalities such as William L. Shirer, Will and Ariel Durant, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. However, from a commercial point of view, Korda is best noted for pioneering best-selling novels by authors such as Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins that in the 1960s were considered very daring.
Michael Korda was a major part of Simon & Schuster for more than forty years and one of the most influential people in the business of book publishing. In the autumn of 1994, he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer. In 1997 he wrote Man to Man, which recounted his medical experience. In 2000, he published Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, about the world of publishing.
Among Korda's better-known books are Charmed Lives, which was a memoir about his life with his father and uncle, and the novel Queenie, which is a roman a clef about his aunt Merle Oberon. The latter was adapted into a TV miniseries.
Michael Korda is the father of Chris Korda, the leader of the controversial Church of Euthanasia.
"Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.""An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition.""Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.""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.""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.""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.""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.""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 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 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 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.""The purely agitation attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.""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.""To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.""What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.""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."