Quotes by Robert Caro

• 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.
• 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.
• Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the United States Senate, he made the Senate work.
• 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.
• I really wanted there to be something in my life that I enjoy just for the beauty of it.
• I never went to a ballet until I was 45 years old. I don't know why.
• 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.
• 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.
• Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.
• 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.
• As you get older, you sometimes feel that it's harder and harder to get something new and wonderful to come into your life.
• My predictions are notably inaccurate.
• I deliberately made an effort not to become an expert on the ballet.
• The New York City Ballet is obviously speaking to a whole new generation and bringing it the same wonder and beauty that it brought previous generations.
• 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 Senate is an unknowing world.
• The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.