Success Quote by Michael Korda

Korda’s line is a bracing demystification of creative life: not a parade of breakthroughs, but a routine intimacy with failure. The phrase “nightly sort of disaster” lands with deliberate bluntness. It takes the romantic chaos of artistry and puts it on a schedule, like doing the dishes. That’s the point: the work doesn’t ask for occasional resilience; it demands a temperament that can metabolize disappointment as a normal cost of production.

The subtext is partly professional advice, partly self-protective realism. When Korda says it’s “not a field…for people who need to have success every day,” he’s really talking about dependence - on praise, on certainty, on the clean dopamine hit of finishing something that feels perfect. Writing rarely gives that. Most days it gives you a page you mistrust, a sentence that won’t behave, a plot that collapses. To stay, you have to decouple effort from immediate validation.

Then he turns the knife in a gentler way: “the ghosts you chase you never catch.” He isn’t describing impostor syndrome; he’s describing the engine of ambition itself. The “ghosts” are the imagined perfect book, the ideal reader response, the version of yourself who writes without friction. You pursue them because they animate the work, but you never “catch” them because the goal is asymptotic - excellence as a moving horizon.

Context matters: Korda is a novelist and longtime publishing insider, someone who’s seen talent and ego, hype and silence. This is less gloom than inoculation. He’s arguing that survival in literature is not confidence; it’s tolerance for the gap between what you meant to make and what you actually made, night after night.