I write from seven to about noon. I used to try to write longer, but I read and I found that I was always getting myself tired by working in the afternoon and then I was just throwing out what I wrote in the afternoon, so writing then was counterproductive.

You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.

Herman Brown was a businessman who wanted value for money spent. His relationships with politicians were measured by that criterion.

I trained myself to be organized.

I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless

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.

Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.