As you get older, you sometimes feel that it's harder and harder to get something new and wonderful to come into your life.

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.

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

The Senate is an unknowing world

Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

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

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

Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.

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

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.

It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.

I couldn't exactly storm away in anger. I'd just have to close my eyes and shut out the universe.

There are times you wake up in the middle of the night, fingers hit the keyboard and you allow words to flow. That is a writer.

People tend to keep their distance.

I don't take modern hip-hop as real. It's entertaining, it's fake, like James Bond.

All the joys in all the worlds of all beings who have ever been or will ever be, will never equal the perfection of one moment of absorption into the stillness of nirvana.

Do not let pleasure distract you from meditation, from the way. Free yourself from pleasure and pain.

The Geezer album, Black Science, had a lot of keyboards and it did not work.

Little startups are ridiculously overfunded.

I never stopped believing in my ability or what I was doing. I want to pass that sense of faith and perseverance on to others.