“To have a childhood surrounded by people like Sir Laurence Olivier and...” — Michael Korda Quote

To have a childhood surrounded by people like Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh sounds glitzy, but for years I wanted to repress it. I couldn't take that kind of power and success.

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 pleasure lies not in the cookies, but in the pattern the crumbs make when the cookies crumble.

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.

The danger of growing up surrounded by endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way.

I knew I wanted to become an actor when I was 7 years old. My dad was working with Alfred Hitchcock, my mom was working with Martin Scorsese - and it was the great summer of my childhood.

I had no childhood, really, so I imagined more than played, and that definitely led to my showbusiness image, the theatrics and the drama of my life.

The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.