154 Quotes by Michael Korda

T. E. Lawrence was far more than a glamorous, swashbuckling, heroic figure in flowing robes mounted on a camel, leading the Arab tribes against the Turks in World War One.

'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?

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.

Nothing in the Middle East is ever forgotten or forgiven.

It is not necessary to agree with the Arab point of view about their own history, but it is foolish to ignore it.

We, in America and Great Britain, have never had to live with evil and ignore it, or pretend it wasn't happening, as people did all over Europe, and indeed, even in Germany herself.

Some people are so famous that the legends about them and the cultural aftermath of their life altogether obscure the real human being.

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.

Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.