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.

We British and Americans have never been conquered and occupied by the Germans, or forced to make the choice between defiance and collaboration, or haunted by the choices, evasions and moral ambiguities that only a defeated and occupied country can feel.

When I started work at Simon & Schuster in 1958, each of us got a bronze paperweight on which was written, in raised type, 'Give the reader a break,' Richard E. Simon.

Michael Korda Quotes