Robert Caro Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fool, Long

• I finish what I have to do in the office.

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Office, Finish

• I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter.

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Try, Mood, Rhythm

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

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feeling, Getting

• I trained myself to be organized.

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Myself, Organized, Trained

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Believe, Writing, Through

• What would be the good of rushing? You want these books to last.

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Last, Books, Rushing

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

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Political, Guy

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

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Genius

  Tags in Political, Come

• The right of a minority is so important in a democracy.

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Democracy

  Tags in Important, Minority

• 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

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Book, Doing

• 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

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Believe, True

• 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.

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Better, Political

• 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

  Topics in Trust

  Tags in Back, Feeling

• You know, we’re taught that in a democracy power comes from being elected.

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Democracy, Power

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Long, Through

• 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.

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Written, Learning

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

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Enough

• Yes, after some time spent last year on other commitments, most of them speaking engagements, I am now about halfway through a novel that I hope will come out in 1998.

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hope, Come, Through

• 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.

  Robert Caro

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Long, Everybody

Robert Caro (51)

Birth:	30th October, 1935
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Journalist

About

Robert Allan Caro is an American journalist and author known for his celebrated biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson.

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• 1951 - Evan Welling Thomas III
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• 2004 - Thom Gunn
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