Top 40 Robert Caro Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Power doesn’t always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.”

— Robert Caro

2. “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.”

— Robert Caro

3. “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.”

— Robert Caro

4. “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.”

— Robert Caro

5. “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 Caro

6. “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 Caro

7. “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.”

— Robert Caro

8. “Herman Brown was a businessman who wanted value for money spent. His relationships with politicians were measured by that criterion.”

— Robert Caro

9. “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.”

— Robert Caro

10. “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.”

— Robert Caro

11. “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.”

— Robert Caro

12. “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.”

— Robert Caro

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

— Robert Caro

14. “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.”

— Robert Caro

15. “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.”

— Robert Caro

16. “There’s a real feeling when you know you’re getting it right. It’s a physical feeling.”

— Robert Caro

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

— Robert Caro

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

— Robert Caro

19. “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.”

— Robert Caro

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

— Robert Caro

21. “My predictions are notably inaccurate.”

— Robert Caro

22. “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.”

— Robert Caro

23. “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.”

— Robert Caro

24. “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.”

— Robert Caro

25. “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.”

— Robert Caro

26. “My interest is in power. How power works.”

— Robert Caro

27. “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.”

— Robert Caro

28. “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.”

— Robert Caro

29. “Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the United States Senate, he made the Senate work.”

— Robert Caro

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

— Robert Caro

31. “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.”

— Robert Caro

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

— Robert Caro

33. “I deliberately made an effort not to become an expert on the ballet.”

— Robert Caro

34. “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.”

— Robert Caro

35. “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.”

— Robert Caro

36. “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.”

— Robert Caro

37. “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.”

— Robert Caro

38. “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.”

— Robert Caro

39. “The Senate is an unknowing world.”

— Robert Caro

40. “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.”

— Robert Caro

41. “I never went to a ballet until I was 45 years old. I don’t know why.”

— Robert Caro