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

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.

Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

Every relationship you have, you're learning and growing and taking something from that.

There's this man who lives in the sky, and he has ten things he doesn't want you to do, and you'll burn for a long time if you do them. But he loves you.

for he is such a disagreeable man, that it would be quite a misfortune to be liked by him.

Everything in the Universe was as the Creator willed it - nothing superfluous, nothing lacking - a harmony.

And I'm a Hailsham student - which is enough by itself sometimes to get people's backs up.

War is idiocy. We live on a small, small planet, and what we do to others is what we do to ourselves

Priority is a function of context.

A hundred yards away, Mike Newton was lowering Bella's limp body to the sidewalk. She slumped unresponsively against the wet concrete, her skin chalky as a corpse. I almost took the door off the car.