NotitiesWorking
Robert A. Caro
In "Working" deelt Robert A. Caro zijn inzichten over het schrijfproces van biografieën en non-fictie. Hij bespreekt zijn methoden voor onderzoek, het belang van feiten en hoe politieke macht zowel goed als kwaad kan onthullen. Caro reflecteert ook op zijn persoonlijke ervaringen en de uitdagingen die hij tegenkomt tijdens het schrijven van zijn boeken.
There are also a few things I’ve learned or discovered, or think I’ve learned or discovered, about the writing of biography and indeed nonfiction in general that I’d like to share or pass along for whatever they’re worth to other writers and to readers interested in nonfiction. And here also are a few things I discovered about myself along the way—starting with a long-ago Election Day in the very tough political town of New Brunswick, New Jersey, when, a wet-behind-the-ears journalist fresh out of Princeton, I found myself “riding the polls” (I didn’t even know what the term meant when I was invited to do so) with a very tough old political boss—and about what I wanted to do with my life and my books (which are my life): how, for example, a row of tiny dots on a map helped lead me to the realization that in order to write about political power the way I wanted to write about it, I would have to write not only about the powerful but about the powerless as well—would have to write about them (and learn about their lives) thoroughly enough so that I could make the reader feel for them, empathize with them, and with what political power did for them, or to them. (Page 0)
Tags: Geel
Note: powerless
When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realize the complexity of the subject, realized that a lot of thinking would be required—thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of—I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. 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typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210.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. (Page 0)
Tags: Geel
It’s the research that takes the time—the research and whatever it is in myself that makes the research take so long, so very much longer than I had planned. Whatever it is that makes me do research the way I do, it’s not something I’m proud of, and it’s not something for which I can take the credit—or the blame. It just seems to be a part of me. Looking back on my life I can see that it’s not really something I have had much choice about; in fact, that it was not something about which, really, I had any choice at all. When I was a reporter, I blamed this feeling on the deadlines. I just hated having to write a story while there were still questions I wanted to ask or documents I wanted to look at. But when I turned to writing books, the deadlines were no longer at the end of a day, or a week, or, occasionally, if you were lucky in journalism, a month. They were years away. But there were deadlines: the publisher’s delivery dates. And there was another constraint: money—money to live on while I was doing the research. But the hard truth was that for me neither of these constraints could stand before the force of this other thing. It wasn’t that I was cavalier about the deadlines. As it happened, I was lucky enough to have a publisher who never mentioned them to me, but they loomed in my mind nonetheless, as I missed them by months and then by years. (Page 0)
Tags: Geel
I tried to write The Power Broker without dramatizing this human cost. I would start outlining the next chapters, to go forward without the East Tremont chapter, and it was as if something in me would rebel, and I would sit there for hours, fiddling with the outline, knowing it was no good, knowing that if I went forward, the book behind me wouldn’t be the book it should be, and my heart just wouldn’t be in the writing anymore. Lack of discipline, you might say. Lack of discipline is what I said. But, looking back now, I have to accept the fact that in deciding to research and write that chapter—as in deciding to research and write so many chapters that it would have been possible to publish the books without including; indeed in doing the books as a whole the way I have done them, taking so long to do them—there really was no choice involved; that I didn’t really have one. (Page 0)
Tags: Geel
The sixth section, adapted from a lecture, is about the fifth and final book in The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the one I’m writing now about President Johnson, and about the 1960s. I can’t discuss that book in any detail here—my writing seems never to come out well if I’ve talked about it beforehand. That was another thing I learned about myself as a reporter. My first job at Newsday was working nights; to get a story “up front” (in the first seven pages of the tabloid), you had to sell it first to the Assistant Night City Editor, then, if he liked it, to the Night City Editor, and then you might also have to discuss it with the Night Editor. By the time I had done all that, I was so bored with the story that I no longer was interested in writing it. (Page 0)
Tags: Geel
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. Why political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about. (Page 3)
Tags: Geel
There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. (Page 10)
Tags: Geel
don’t know why raw files affect me that way. In part, perhaps, because they are closer to reality, to genuineness. Not filtered, cleaned up, through press releases or, years later, in books. I worked all night, but I didn’t notice the passing of time. (Page 10)
Tags: Geel
He didn’t look up. After a while, I said tentatively, “Mr. Hathway.” I couldn’t get the “Alan” out. He motioned me to sit down, and went on reading. Finally he raised his head. “I didn’t know someone from Princeton could do digging like this,” he said. “From now on, you do investigative work.” I responded with my usual savoir faire. “But I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.” Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.” (Page 11)
Tags: Geel
A FEW YEARS INTO my tenure at Newsday, I’d had a few scoops and successes. I’d been nominated for a Pulitzer and had won a couple of minor, I mean really minor, journalistic awards, but when you’re young, and you win something, even minor, you think you know everything. I thought I was really something. I thought I knew everything about politics and how politics and political power worked. (Page 12)
Tags: Geel
I remember I drove home that night, and all the way down from Albany to our house on Long Island—it was 163 miles—I kept thinking, Everything you’ve been doing is bullshit. 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. (Page 13)
Tags: Geel
WHEN I FIRST BEGAN The Power Broker in 1966, since we didn’t have any savings to speak of, and we had a son, and my advance was so small that I still needed a weekly paycheck, I convinced myself that I could write the book while continuing to work at Newsday. But that illusion didn’t last very long. I wasn’t making much progress on the book, hardly any progress at all. Then I heard about something called the Carnegie Fellowship in Journalism. They took one working journalist at a time and paid him his weekly salary for a year while he wrote a book. I wrote a letter of application, and I received the fellowship. I quit Newsday immediately and told Ina, “They’re paying me for a whole year and I have this outline, I’ll be done in nine months, and then we can finally go to France.” I had always met my newspaper deadlines. And my outline said I’d be done in nine months. At the end of the year, of course, the book was barely started, and we were completely out of money. (Page 15)
Tags: Geel
Lynn had read my manuscript, and said, “I’d like to represent you, but you have to tell me something first. Why do you look so worried?” I didn’t know I looked worried. But of course I was. I told her, “I’m worried that I won’t have enough money to finish the book.” My editor had left me feeling that few people would read a book on Robert Moses, and that therefore no publisher would give me the money I needed to finish it. She asked how much money I was talking about. I told her I needed enough so I could spend two more years on the book. I thought it would take me two years. I don’t remember the exact amount I specified, but I know it was not that large. And all of a sudden there were other sentences that I’ll never forget. She said, “Is that what you’re worried about? Then you can stop worrying right now. I can get you that by just picking up the phone. Everybody in New York knows about this book.” Then she said, “You can stop worrying about money. But I’ve read this manuscript. What you care about is writing. My job is to find you an editor you can work with for the rest of your life. I’m going to set up lunches for you”—I think there were four, all with well-known editors—“ and you can pick the one you want to work with.” Three of the editors took me to the Four Seasons or some other fancy restaurant, and basically said they could make me a star. Bob Gottlieb at Knopf said, “Well, I don’t go out for lunch, but we can have a sandwich at my desk and talk about your book.” So of course I picked him. (Page 17)
Tags: Geel
contract. I had, however, drawn, on a piece of paper, a series of concentric circles around a dot that represented him. The innermost circle was his family, friends, and close associates, and I was prepared to believe that he could keep me from seeing them, and probably the persons in the next circle or two, also. But surely, I felt, there would be people in the outer circles—people who knew him but were not in regular contact with him—who would be willing to talk to me. (Page 22)
Tags: Geel
In my mind, I saw him now, staring down in the evenings on the Hudson waterfront, and I couldn’t forget him. Sometimes, in my imagination, I saw him from below—a tall, handsome, haughty figure in white, standing on the edge of a high cliff and gazing down on a vast wasteland with the eyes of a creator, determined to transform it into something beautiful and grand. Sometimes, I saw him from behind—a tall black silhouette against the setting sun. Robert Moses gazing down on Riverside Park lodged in my imagination and, in my imagination, became entangled in a mystery: I had previously been aware only of the Robert Moses of the 1950s and ’60s: the ruthless highway builder who ran his roads straight through hapless neighborhoods, the Robert Moses of the Title I urban-renewal scandals—some of the biggest and most sordid scandals of twentieth-century New York, scandals almost incredible both for the colossal scale of their corruption (personally “money honest” himself, Moses dispensed to the most powerful members of the city’s ruling Democratic political machine what one insider called “a king’s ransom” in legal fees, public relations retainers, insurance premiums, advance knowledge of highway routes and urban renewal sites, and insurance-free deposits in favored banks, to insure their cooperation with his aims) and for the heartbreaking callousness with which he evicted the tens of thousands of poor people in his way, whom, in the words of one official, he “hounded out like cattle.” Now I saw something very different: the young Robert Moses, the dreamer and idealist. How had the one man become the other? (Page 28)
Tags: Geel
Note: how had the one man become the other
He shaped the city physically not only by what he built but by what he destroyed. (Page 34)
Tags: Geel
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. (Page 60)
Tags: Geel
By the time I was admitted to the Allen Room, moreover, my feelings about my book involved not only unreality, but doubt as well. For one thing, it seemed far too long to be a book. More and more frequently, as the piles of manuscript on my desk grew, I would calculate the words I had written (the final draft of The Power Broker—not a rough draft, the polished final draft—would be 1,050,000 words, cut to 700,000 words for publication) and I had to wonder if what I was doing would ever be published. (Page 73)
Tags: Geel
When I had started, I had firmly believed that I would be done in a year, a naïve but perhaps not unnatural belief for someone whose longest previous deadline had been measured in weeks. As year followed year, and I was still not nearly done, I became convinced that I had gone terribly astray. (Page 73)
Tags: Geel
And these writers provided more for me than merely the glow of their names. In my memory, no one spoke to me for the first few days I was in the room. Then one day, I looked up and James Flexner was standing over me. The expression on his face was friendly, but after he had asked what I was writing about, the next question was the question I had come to dread: “How long have you been working on it?” This time, however, when I replied, “Five years,” the response was not an incredulous stare. “Oh,” Jim Flexner said, “that’s not so long. I’ve been working on my Washington for nine years.” I could have jumped up and kissed him, whiskers and all—as, the next day, I could have jumped up and kissed Joe Lash, big beard and all, when he asked me the same question, and, after hearing my answer, said in his quiet way, “Eleanor and Franklin took me seven years.” In a couple of sentences, these two men—idols of mine—had wiped away five years of doubt. (Page 76)
Tags: Geel
BEFORE THE CAMPAIGN was over—in that single month, October, 1940—Lyndon Johnson had raised from Texas and had distributed to congressional candidates, campaign funds on a scale that dwarfed anything ever given to Democratic congressional candidates from a single, central source. (Page 94)
Tags: Geel
Equally disturbing, the more I talked to them, the more I realized that it wasn’t just the young Lyndon Johnson I wasn’t understanding, the same was true of the people to whom I was talking: I wasn’t understanding them, either—their culture, their mores. They were obviously very different from me, or from any people I had encountered before, and I didn’t know how to break through. (Page 102)
Tags: Geel
We rented a house on the edge of the Hill Country, where we were to live for most of the next three years. That changed everything. As soon as we had moved there, as soon as the people of the Hill Country realized we were there to stay, their attitude towards us softened; they started to talk to me in a different way. (Page 103)
Tags: Geel
The shadows lengthened, the room grew darker. The voice went on. (Page 108)
Tags: Geel
I wanted to examine, to dissect, a stolen election in detail. But part of the reason was neither straightforward nor professional, nor, to be honest (or as honest as possible), was it something that had much to do with reason. It had to do with that something in me, that something in my nature, which, as I said earlier, wasn’t a quality I could be proud of or could take credit for. It wasn’t something that, as I missed yet another deadline by months or years, I could take the blame for, either. It was just part of me, like it or not; the part of me that had hated writing an article for Newsday while I still had questions—or even a question—left to ask; the part of me that, now that I was writing books, kept leading me, after I had gotten every question answered, to suddenly think, despite myself, of new questions that, in the instant of thinking them, I felt must be answered for my book to be complete; the part of me that kept leading me to think of new avenues of research that, even as I thought of them, I felt it was crucial to head down. It wasn’t something about which, I had learned the hard way, I had a choice; in reality I had no choice at all. In my defense: while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts—through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing—can’t be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time. (Page 111)
Tags: Geel
Note: Truth takes time
OF COURSE THERE WAS more. If you ask the right questions, there always is. That’s the problem. (Page 128)
Tags: Geel
Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. (Page 137)
Tags: Geel
When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. (Page 137)
Tags: Geel
The importance of a sense of place is commonly accepted in the world of fiction; I wish that were also true about biography and history, about nonfiction in general, in fact. The overall quality, the overall level, of writing is, I believe, just as important in the one as in the other. By “a sense of place,” I mean helping the reader to visualize the physical setting in which a book’s action is occurring: to see it clearly enough, in sufficient detail, so that he feels as if he himself were present while the action is occurring. (Page 141)
Tags: Geel
Because biography should not be just a collection of facts. Its base, the base of all history, of course is the facts, it’s always the facts, and you have to do your best to get them, and get them right. But once you have gotten as many of them as possible, it’s also of real importance to enable the reader to see in his mind the places in which the book’s facts are located. If a reader can visualize them for himself, then he may be able to understand things without the writer having to explain them; seeing something for yourself always makes you understand it better. (Page 141)
Tags: Geel
Looking back on my work on Johnson, I think I realized on my very first drive into the Hill Country—or should have realized—that I was entering a world I really didn’t understand and wasn’t prepared for. (Page 143)
Tags: Geel
As I’ve said, I write my first drafts in longhand—pen or pencil—on white legal pads, narrow-lined. I seldom have only one draft in longhand—I’d say I probably have three or four. Then I do the same pages over on a typewriter. I used to type on what they called “second sheets,” brownish sheets, cheap paper like the paper used in the Newsday city room when I was a reporter. But those sheets are letter size. When I started writing books, I switched to white legal-size typing paper. You can get more words on a page that way. I triple-space the lines the way I did as a newspaperman, so there will be plenty of room to rewrite in pencil. I rewrite a lot. Sometimes I look at a page I typed but have reworked in pencil, and there’s hardly a word in type left on it. Or no words in type left at all—every one has been crossed out. And often there’s been so much writing and rewriting and erasing that the page has to be tossed out completely. At the end of the day there will be a great many crumpled-up sheets of paper in the wastepaper basket or on the floor around it. (Page 162)
Tags: Geel
I used to work late in the day or even into the evening, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve had to accept the fact that I’m just not able to work the same way. I always start each day by reading what I wrote the previous day, and more and more frequently when I reread the stuff I wrote in the late afternoon the day before, it was no good and I had to throw it out. So there was no sense in working late; I stop earlier now. (Page 162)
Tags: Geel
Looking at Lyndon Johnson passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, gives us a chance to understand exactly what that French minister meant. Johnson takes up the cause of civil rights four days after John Kennedy’s assassination. He tells Congress: “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” The books of law. A law. That was what Johnson felt mattered. An executive order, as we’re all learning now to our sorrow, is just a piece of paper and can be repealed by another piece of paper. But to write it in the books of law—once you succeed in that, it’s not so easy to change. (Page 172)
Tags: Geel
Interviewing: if you talk to people long enough, if you talk to them enough times, you find out things from them that maybe they didn’t even realize they knew. (Page 176)
Tags: Geel
There were 23,000 American troops in Vietnam when Lyndon Johnson took office. By the end of 1965, there would be 184,000 there. By the end of his presidency, there would be 586,000 there. There were before the war ended 58,000 American dead, and that’s the figure you keep hearing when people talk, 58,000 dead. But what of the others? The number of seriously wounded, defined as seriously wounded Americans, was 288,000. Blinded, for instance, amputations, for instance, young men waking up in a hospital and looking down at the place where their legs used to be. Plus the Vietnamese dead. I’ve been trying for years to get accurate figures on that: the South Vietnamese civilians, South Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnamese civilians, North Vietnamese soldiers, who died in that war. I don’t yet have figures that I regard as reliable, but I’m going to get them. I can say now that the number is more than two million. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped on Germany in all of World War II. (Page 180)
Tags: Geel
There is evil and injustice that can be caused by political power, but there is also great good. It seems to me sometimes that people have forgotten this. They’ve forgotten, for example, what Franklin Roosevelt did: how he transformed people’s lives. How he gave hope to people. Now people talk in vague terms about government programs and infrastructure, but they’ve forgotten the women of the Hill Country and how electricity changed their lives. They’ve forgotten that when Robert Moses got the Triborough Bridge built in New York, that was infrastructure. To provide enough concrete for its roadways and immense anchorages, cement factories that had been closed by the Depression had to be reopened in a dozen states; to make steel for its girders, fifty separate steel mills had to be fired up. And that one bridge created thousands of jobs: 31,000,000 man hours of work, done in twenty states, went into it. We certainly see how government can work to your detriment today, but people have forgotten what government can do for you. They’ve forgotten the potential of government, the power of government, to transform people’s lives for the better. (Page 183)
Tags: Geel
This interview took place over the course of four sessions, which were conducted in his Manhattan office, near Columbus Circle. The room is spartan, containing little more than a desk, a sofa, several file cabinets, and large bookcases crammed with well-thumbed volumes on figures like FDR, Al Smith, and the Kennedy brothers—not to mention copies of Caro’s own books. One wall is dominated by the large bulletin boards where he pins his outlines, which on several occasions he politely asked me not to read. On the desk sit his Smith-Corona Electra typewriter, a few legal pads, and the room’s only ornamental touch: a lamp whose base is a statuette of a charioteer driving two rearing horses. (Page 187)
Tags: Geel
I knew what I really wanted to do for my second book, because I had come to realize something. I wasn’t interested in writing a biography but in writing about political power. (Page 190)
Tags: Geel
CARO: ...I thought, It matters that people read this. Here was a guy who was never elected to anything, and he had more power than any mayor, more than any governor, more than any mayor or governor combined, and he kept this power for forty-four years, and with it he shaped so much of our lives. I told myself, You have to try to write an introduction that makes the reader feel what you feel about his importance, his fascination as a character, as a human being. I remember rewriting that introduction endless times. For instance, Moses built 627 miles of roads. I said, Come on, that’s just a bare statement of fact—how do you make people grasp the immensity of this? And I remembered reading the Iliad in college. The Iliad did it with lists, you know? With the enumeration of all the nations and all the ships that are sent to Troy to show the magnitude and magnificence of the Trojan War. In college, the professor kept talking about Homer’s imagery, Homer’s symbolism, et cetera in the Iliad and the Odyssey. I would be sitting there thinking, Look what Homer does with the ships! Not that I would ever think of comparing myself with Homer, but great works of art can be inspiring as models. So in the introduction to The Power Broker, I tried listing all the expressways and all the parkways. I hoped that the weight of all the names would give Moses’ accomplishment more reality. But then I felt, That’s not good enough. Can you put the names into an order that has a rhythm to it that will give them more force and power and, in that way, add to the understanding of the magnitude of the accomplishment? “He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway,...
... the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.” I thought I could have a rhythm that builds, and then change it abruptly in the last sentence. Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters. All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to accomplish what they should accomplish, they have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do. (Page 192)
Tags: Geel
I thought, You have the scenes, but it’s your job to make the reader feel the desperation. (Page 193)
Tags: Geel
You look at so many books, and it seems like all the writer cares about is getting the facts in. But the facts alone aren’t enough. (Page 194)
Tags: Geel
CARO: I can’t start writing a book until I’ve thought it through and can see it whole in my mind. So before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two, or one—that’s when it comes into view. That process might take weeks. And then I turn those paragraphs into an outline of the whole book. That’s what you see up here on my wall now—twenty-seven typewritten pages. That’s the fifth volume. Then, with the whole book in mind, I go chapter by chapter. I sit down at the typewriter and type an outline of that chapter, let’s say if it’s a long chapter, seven pages—it’s really the chapter in brief, without any of the supporting evidence. Then, each chapter gets a notebook, which I fill with all the materials I want to use—quotations and facts pulled from all of the research I’ve done. (Page 197)
Tags: Geel
Note: Outline
If you saw me during this process, in the first place you’d see a guy in a very bad mood. It’s very frustrating. I can’t actually say anything nice about this part of the work. It’s a terrible time for me. I sometimes think, You’re never going to get it. There’s just so much stuff to put in this book. You’re never going to have a unified book with a drive from beginning to end, a single narrative, a single driving theme from beginning to end. There’s just too much stuff. (Page 198)
Tags: Geel
Getting that boiled-down paragraph or two is terribly hard, but I have to tell you that my experience is that if you get it, the whole next seven years is easier. When you have it, it’s so comforting, because you’re typing away, and you can look over—it’s usually stuck on the wall right there, but I don’t want you to see it, actually. I put it away. I don’t like anyone to see my notes. But you can look over there and say, You’re doing this whole thing on civil rights—let’s take Master of the Senate—the whole history of the civil rights movement. Is this fitting in with those three paragraphs? How is it fitting in? What you just wrote is good, but it’s not fitting in. So you have to throw it away or find a way to make it fit in. So it’s very comforting to have that. (Page 199)
Tags: Geel
CARO: I’m not sure I ever think the writing is going well. Every day I reread what I wrote the day before, and I’ve learned from hard experience that it’s a real mistake to get too confident about what I’ve written. I do so much writing and rewriting. And Knopf knows. I rewrite the galleys completely. I even rewrite in page proofs, which they don’t actually allow you to do, but they’ve been very good to me. I’d rewrite in the finished book if I could.... (Page 200)
Tags: Geel
CARO: I generally get up around seven or so, and I walk to work through Central Park outlining the first paragraphs that I’m going to write that day. (Page 200)
Tags: Geel
CARO: I have to, because I have a wonderful relationship with my editor and my publisher. I have no real deadlines. I’m never asked, When are you going to deliver? So it’s easy to fool yourself that you’re really working hard when you’re not. And I’m naturally lazy. So what I do is—people laugh at me—I put on a jacket and a tie to come to work, because when I was young, everybody wore jackets and ties to work, and I want to remind myself that I’m going to a job. I have to produce. I write down how many words I’ve done in a day. Not to the word—I count the lines. I do it as we used to do it in the newspaper business, ten words to a line. I do a lot of little things to try to make me remember it’s a job. I try to do at least three pages a day. Some days you don’t, but without some kind of quota, I think you’re fooling yourself. (Page 201)
Tags: Geel
CARO: You try to learn as much about the people as you can. I try never to give psychohistory.... It’s as hard to understand someone you’re writing about as it is to understand someone in real life, but there are a lot of objective facts about their lives and actions, and the more of them you learn, the closer you come to whatever understanding is possible. (Page 201)
Tags: Geel
Really, my books are an examination of what power does to people. Power doesn’t always corrupt, and you can see it in the case of, for example, Al Smith or Sam Rayburn. There, power cleanses. But what power always does is reveal, because when you’re climbing, you have to conceal from people what it is you’re really willing to do, what it is you want to do. But once you get enough power, once you’re there, where you wanted to be all along, then you can see what the protagonist wanted to do all along, because now he’s doing it. (Page 206)
Tags: Geel