Top 35 Michael Korda Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Michael Korda

Featured in: Goal Setting Quotes, Momentum Quotes

2. “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!”

— Michael Korda

3. “To succeed, we must first believe that we can.”

— Michael Korda

4. “If your position is everywhere, your momentum is zero.”

— Michael Korda

5. “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.”

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

9. “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.”

— Michael Korda

10. “Concentration is the magic key that opens the door to accomplishment.”

— Michael Korda

11. “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.”

— Michael Korda

12. “What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.”

— Michael Korda

13. “Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one’s origins and one’s final achievement.”

— Michael Korda

14. “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.”

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

17. “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.”

— Michael Korda

18. “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.”

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

21. “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.”

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

23. “It must be nice, Queenie thought, to be one thing or another, to know where you belonged.”

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

25. “Gossip, unlike river water, flows both ways.”

— Michael Korda

26. “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.”

— Michael Korda

27. “An once of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.”

— Michael Korda

28. “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.”

— Michael Korda

29. “Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.”

— Michael Korda

30. “We sell books, other people sell shoes. What’s the difference? Publishing isn’t the highest art.”

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

32. “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.”

— Michael Korda

33. “Lee was a born pedagogue, never happier than when his children were learning to do something the right way. It is a testament to Lee’s affection and patience that his children did not rebel. In fact, they appear to have thrived.”

— Michael Korda

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

— Michael Korda

35. “Across some of the harshest and most difficult terrain in the world, led by a man who already had a price on his head.”

— Michael Korda

36. “It is worth noting that the desert provides every kind of torment – heat, cold, rain, flash floods, windstorms, biting insects, and sandstorms, sometimes all on the same day.”

— Michael Korda

37. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He had an instinctive understanding of the fact that the British as a people dislike boasting, and pride themselves not on victory but on being able to “take it.”

— Michael Korda