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“But you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”
That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210. And yet, even thus slowed down, I will, when I’m writing, set myself the goal of a minimum of a thousand words a day, and, as the chart I keep on my closet door attests, most days meet it. It’s the research that takes the time—the research
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From the very start I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times—particularly the force that is political power.
There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself.
“Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.”
When you need to get information from somebody, you have to find some way to get it.
Underlying every one of my stories was the traditional belief that you’re in a democracy and the power in a democracy comes from being elected. Yet here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he’s had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power. And, thinking about it later, I realized: and neither does anybody else.
To really show political power, you had to show the effect of power on the powerless, and show it fully enough so the reader could feel it.
Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer.
