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" 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. "

Robert Caro

Myself

Fool

Job

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Robert Caro

Finish

Office

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" The Senate is an unknowing world. "

Robert Caro

World

Senate

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I trained myself to be organized. "

" 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. "

Robert Caro

Years

Power

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" My predictions are notably inaccurate. "

Robert Caro

Inaccurate

Predictions

" 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. "

" 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

" I was trying to learn about Lyndon Johnson when he was young and creating his first political machine in the Texas hill country. I moved there for three years. You had to learn that world. "

" 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. "