Robert Caro Quotes

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

I'm not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.

A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

The thing I am attracted to is just good writing and stories that are based somewhat in reality.

Basically, I just write whatever story grabs me rather than considering the genre.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

I'm not a writer, and I don't want there to be any mistake about that.

My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium

I will literally read anything, regardless of genre, fiction or non-fiction, as long as it's well written.

My preference is for really good writing, and I just really don't care where it is.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

Writing is so fun precisely because if you take out the right adjective, the readers can decide what kind of book is in their hands. Suspension of disbelief should not be mandatory in contemporary writing.

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.