Michael Korda

The real fans do not just admire the star of their choice, they identify with him or her, while the star, unlike Joan Crawford, comes to need the fans' love, admiration, and constant interest. ”

The relationship between stars and their fans is always ambivalent and often highly charged with contradictory and ambivalent emotions, of which the most powerful is need. ”

It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book. ”

In my experience, with very few exceptions - I am, as it happens, one of the exceptions - the one thing that most editors don't want to do is edit. It's not nearly as conducive to a successful career as having lunch out with important agents or going to meetings where you get noticed. ”

Ronald Reagan had a kind of shallow movie-star charisma - a combination of makeup and the skill of a good actor - but it wasn't the real thing, and was something that he could turn off when the cameras weren't running. ”

Those of us who have not had the experience of being invaded by the Germans are in no position to criticize those who accommodated themselves to German occupation, with its ferocious punishments for those who expressed even the mildest opposition. ”

The studio moguls were certainly bigger-than-life figures, but they were also tough and unforgiving street fighters to a man, redeemed only because they were also the butt of so many Hollywood jokes. ”

Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars - or by attempts to get them to write a memoir. ”

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life. ”

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.' ”