Mutual funds give people the sense that they're investing with the big boys and that they're really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.

The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.

Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won't have any future.

Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.

In waiting for the glorious moment of that first book contract, writers must have giant reservoirs of patience. Yet they must persevere because they don't know the destiny that is being worked out for them. They creep humbly along the ground, without the spacious aerial vision of their lives that would show them the destiny in store for them.