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.
Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.
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
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.
You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.
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
As you get older, you sometimes feel that it's harder and harder to get something new and wonderful to come into your life.
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.
Someday a political genius will come along and make the Senate work.
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.
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.
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.
To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.
You can lose a reader in a blink of an eye. If a person is an engineer or chemist or an anthropologist or whatever, you spoil the whole book for that person if there's obviously ignorance here. What's wrong with so much science fiction is that the science is so lousy that it isn't worth paying attention to.
There's a feeling about it. You feel almost like a cabinetmaker, laying planks. There's a real feeling when you know you're getting it right. It's a physical feeling.
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
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
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.
I write from seven to about noon. I used to try to write longer, but I read and I found that I was always getting myself tired by working in the afternoon and then I was just throwing out what I wrote in the afternoon, so writing then was counterproductive.
The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.
Among the reasons that you go into journalism, I suppose, are some rather idealistic, even foolish reasons. In my case one of the reasons was I wanted to explain how things really work, how political power really works.
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
Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.
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.
