Quotes from Robert Caro

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.

I trained myself to be organized.

Everything seems to be going faster and faster. It's really harder to create something that endures. The New York City Ballet has succeeded in doing that.

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.

We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't believe it's always true any more. Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

The right of a minority is so important in a democracy.

I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter.

Robert Moses wasn't elected to anything. We're taught that in a democracy power comes from being elected. He had more power than anyone, and he held it for 48 years.

You know, my first three or four drafts, you can see, are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter, and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at.

Sometimes during a ballet I'll look around and see all these rows of intent faces, concentrating on this beautiful thing up on the stage.

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

To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.

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

Someday a political genius will come along and make the Senate work.

I used to work very long hours. Then I started to realize that the stuff that I was writing in the late afternoons, I was generally throwing out. So I quit earlier than I used to.

The New York City Ballet is obviously speaking to a whole new generation and bringing it the same wonder and beauty that it brought previous generations

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.

There's a theory, and I think the theory is right, that in order to make a change you've got to make the whole language of the page harmonious. Well, that's a lot easier with a computer.

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