97 Quotes by Robert Caro

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.

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

My predictions are notably inaccurate.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

I’ve always felt that no one understands why some books of non-fiction endure and some don’t, because there’s not much understanding among many non-fiction writers that the narrative is terribly important.