Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

Robert Caro

Long

Know

You

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Everyone believed the Senate could not really be led. It used to take so long to rise up through seniority. In two years Lyndon Johnson is assistant leader of his party. In four years he is the leader of his party. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

Robert Caro

Fool

Thinking

" 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. "

" 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. "

Robert Caro

End

Work

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

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