Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The moment the curtain rose on that first ballet, I knew something wonderful and new had come into my life. I can still see the first scene. The ballet was Divertimento No. 15. "

" If you really want to show power in its larger aspects, you need to show the effects on the powerless, for good or ill - the human cost of public works. That's what I try to do, show not only how power works but its effect on people. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I think President Obama has done more than he is given credit for. "

" Most Sundays, with the exception of football Sundays, I work, because I don't take days off as long as I'm working on something that's supposed to be all in the same mood. "

" 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. "

" I trained myself to be organized. "

" 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. "

" When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" The Senate is an unknowing world. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Nobody believes this, but I write very fast. "

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

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