Robert Caro

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The Senate is an unknowing world.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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 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 right of a minority is so important in a democracy.”

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

“I finish what I have to do in the office.”