Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Caro

Beneath the modesty of Robert Caro's "I sometimes feel" is a hard-line aesthetic: time is the only review that matters. He chooses an oddly specific threshold - "more than 20 years" - as if to dodge hype cycles and bestseller noise, and to replace them with a quieter, crueller metric. Twenty years is long enough for a book to outlive its publicity, its first-wave readership, and the cultural moment that made it "relevant". If it still moves, still sells, still gets handed from one person to another, then it has crossed from product into artifact.

The subtext is Caro's lifelong argument about power and permanence. His biographies and political histories are built like infrastructure: exhaustive reporting, structural patience, sentences engineered to carry weight. So when he talks about endurance, he's also defending the kind of labor the contemporary attention economy treats as suspect - years in archives, interviews that take months to unlock, narrative choices that privilege clarity over cleverness. "Gee" is doing work, too: an almost sheepish American shrug that masks a ruthless standard. He's not chasing timelessness as a vibe; he's describing it as an outcome you earn by taking the world seriously.

Contextually, this is a writer who has watched reputations rise on launch-week heat and then vanish. Caro's point is less about sales as commerce than sales as proof of continued use: strangers, decades later, still deciding the book is worth their time. That's the only immortality a working writer can verify.