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.

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

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.

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

What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

An once of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

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

'Il faut vivre' might almost be the French national motto from 1940 to June 1944, but who is to say ours would have been any different if the Germans had paraded victoriously through London and Generalfeldmarschall Von Runstedt made his headquarters at Claridge's?

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Chanel took women out of corsets and put them into the 'simple little black dress,' the perfectly tailored suit, the bell-bottom sailor pants, and jersey tops.

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

FDR had a certain charisma, at least in his first term, with the big grin, the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle, and the battered hat on his imposing head, but no other American president since then has had it except JFK - indeed, some of them have been positively anti-charismatic, like Gerald Ford, Carter, and the Bushes.

Few things are more painful than being a successful writer born in a small country with an impenetrable language.

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.

For a brief moment, Ian Fleming made being an Englishman seem sexy, even to the French. He should have been awarded a knighthood, even possibly the Garter.

From time to time, one imagined Bill Clinton had charisma, but it never really was more than an occasional false glare.

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!

Hebron is a bone of contention between Israeli settlers and the Palestinians in part because Abraham is buried there, in the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

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

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.

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

I come from a family that was very strong, very successful, very bizarre, and terrifically exciting. Being a Korda is something I regard as special - not wonderful, or worthy of a national monument, but special.

I did meet Sen. Robert Kennedy, and it taught me something about political charisma.

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.

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

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

I have an admiration for Mr. Eastwood that borders on the kind that I have for the Grand Canyon. Like it, he is craggy, worn, awesomely impressive and unique, a living four-star tourist attraction that, in the formulaic words of the Guide Michelin, 'vaut le voyage.'

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.

I only met Ian Fleming once, at a party given by my father's friend the director Carol Reed, at his house at 211 King's Road, Chelsea, the garden of which he shared with Peter Ustinov.

I'd fought in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, having left Oxford to do so.

I'm a relatively unfocused person.

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.