Quotes By Robert Caro

The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.

There's a real feeling when you know you're getting it right. It's a physical feeling.

There used to be this feeling under Eisenhower and Kennedy and Roosevelt and Truman that government was a solution. Trust in the presidency fell precipitously under Johnson - real lows. And it's never come back. It's a trend that, if you're liberal, is really discouraging.

I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.

Now, for this book I had to learn the world of the Senate, which is really for all that's written about the Senate, an unknowing world and its mores, and the way things work with subcommittees and all. I loved learning about that.

I really wanted there to be something in my life that I enjoy just for the beauty of it.

I never went to a ballet until I was 45 years old. I don't know why.

You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you're in another world.

I finish what I have to do in the office.

Long Island is shaped the way it is largely because of Robert Moses. Long Island is a perfect example of how political power shapes people's lives every day.

I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.

Nobody believes this, but I write very fast.

Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the United States Senate, he made the Senate work.

Whenever I go to work I wear a jacket and a tie, because I'm inherently quite lazy, and my books take so long to do, and my publishers don't bug me, so it's so easy to fool yourself into thinking you're working harder than you really are.

If it's coming near the end of a chapter and I'm really getting into it, I tend to get up earlier and earlier, just because I'm excited to get to work.

At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life.

Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.

You know, we're taught that in a democracy power comes from being elected.

I like new ballets because they're totally new. As you get older, new experiences are harder and harder to come by, so it's pretty great to have a new experience.

As you get older, you sometimes feel that it's harder and harder to get something new and wonderful to come into your life.

I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless.

The Senate is an unknowing world.

My predictions are notably inaccurate.

In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.

You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.

If things are going well, if the writing's coming along, I jump out of bed happy. And if the previous day has been bad, I get out of bed disgruntled.

Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.

It's very easy to fool yourself that you're working, you know, when you're really not working very hard. I mean, I'm very lazy. So for me, I would always have an excuse, you know, to go - quit early, go to a museum, you know. So I do everything I can to make myself remember this is a job. I keep a schedule.

What would be the good of rushing? You want these books to last.

I deliberately made an effort not to become an expert on the ballet.