A biography for Robert Carohasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“There's a real feeling when you know you're getting it right. It's a physical feeling.”
“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.”
“As you get older, you sometimes feel that it's harder and harder to get something new and wonderful to come into your life.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter.”
“I trained myself to be organized.”
“I deliberately made an effort not to become an expert on the ballet.”
“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.”
“Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the United States Senate, he made the Senate work.”
“I really wanted there to be something in my life that I enjoy just for the beauty of it.”
“Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“My predictions are notably inaccurate.”
“Nobody believes this, but I write very fast.”
“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.”