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.

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.

Religion, for instance, cannot be accepted or rejected out of hand, until the student knows exactly what religion means.

Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it.

Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.

You can't wrestle forever. It's a very physically taxing job. There's no doubt about it. Physically, and more importantly, mentally.

You've got to work at living-99 and 9/10 of Americans work at dying!

Damn, but science is just a constant feed of cool new facts and theories. Theology doesn't come close.

Where I once believed people were there to be used, I started thinking of other people first.

The image I had was very clear, and so in that way The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane began like other books.

Flippancy may be a lance tilted in the face of fear.

'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'