Robert Gottlieb quotes:

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  • There are certain historical figures of such importance that we need to know everything about them, which is why books about Napoleon, Lincoln, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, and the great religious founders continue to proliferate; these lives require constant reevaluation and interpretation.

  • Who would have thought that a tap-dancing penguin would outpoint James Bond at the box office? And deserve to? Not that there's anything wrong with 'Casino Royale.' But 'Happy Feet' - written and directed by George Miller - is a complete charmer, even if, in the way of most family fare, it can't resist straying into the Inspirational.

  • In traditional 'Swan Lakes,' it's Prince Siegfried's 21st-birthday celebration, his coming-of-age. The entire court, from his mother the Queen on down, is on hand.

  • A Midsummer Night's Dream' is one of George Balanchine's greatest creations - and one of the greatest of all story ballets.

  • What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.

  • Eclipse' is a concept piece, and its concept centers on 36 large light bulbs strung from above in a geometrical pattern and at different heights, some of them at times down below the dancers' chest level.

  • I hated Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned.

  • The first time the Kirov ballet was seen in America was on Sept. 11, 1961. The ballet was 'Swan Lake.' The ballerina was Inna Zubkovskaya. The place was the old Met, on what must have been one of the hottest nights of the year, and there was no air-conditioning.

  • In 1998, Vanity Fair asked me to write a big piece for them on the 50th anniversary of the New York City Ballet. My life, to a great extent, had been spent at and with the New York City Ballet, and I decided to try it. It was very scary, writing about something I loved so much and had such strong opinions about.

  • Eclipse' is overlong and overly self-conscious, but it isn't a fake or a zero; it just gets exhausting. It raises a crucial question: 'When does Concept morph into Gimmick?'

  • The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.

  • Paul Taylor's 'Offenbach Overtures' has lots of zip and charm, and its pair of dueling soldiers in red, who end up starry-eyed about each other while their disgusted seconds take up the quarrel, is nonstop funny.

  • Schumann's 'Quintet in E flat for Piano and Strings' is one of the sublime moments in Romantic music.

  • When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills.

  • We all need each other in publishing to make publishing work for authors in a variety of formats now and in the future. Anyone who thinks publishers don't bring anything to the table has a very narrow view and lack of knowledge about the industry as a whole.

  • Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance.

  • You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study.

  • One of the eternal mysteries of ballet is how untalented choreographers find backers for their work, and then find good dancers to perform in it. Is it irresistible charm? Chutzpah? Pure determination? Blackmail? Or are so many supposedly knowledgeable people just plain blind?

  • Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet's ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at.

  • It's often the case that the most strained moments in books are the very beginning and the very end - the getting in and the getting out. The ending, especially: it's awkward, as if the writer doesn't know when the book is over and nervously says it all again.

  • What makes a publishing house great? The easy answer is the consistency with which it produces books of value over a lengthy period of time.

  • Of the great singing stars of the 1940s and '50s, only one - Nat King Cole - died young, at age 45.

  • The eternal and uneasy relationship between ballet and modern dance endures, but radically altered in tone and intensity.

  • Martha Graham, along with George Balanchine, is one of the two commanding figures in 20th-century American dance. For those much younger than I am, her genius as a performer will have to be taken on faith - and on the always-suspect evidence of film. What will last, if things go well, is her genius as a choreographer, as a woman of the theater.

  • How the English love playing at being naughty boys!

  • Empty Moves' is elegantly and coolly inventive. Two pairs of dancers shadow each other in slow, deliberate rearrangements and manipulations of legs and torsos, only occasionally switching partners or breaking free of the formal patterning.

  • Just as I was turning fifteen, in the spring of 1946, my parents took me to see 'The Glass Menagerie,' well into its year-long run. I had seen a number of shows on Broadway by then, but nothing like this - because there was nothing like this on Broadway.

  • Every great dance company, even when it seems poised in perfect balance, needs constant renewal of both repertory and performers.

  • The mystery of Christopher Wheeldon deepens. Yes, he's the most talented of the younger ballet choreographers - indeed, where's the competition? Yes, he's particularly good at nurturing dancers and identifying their essential qualities.

  • Despite the rigid classicism of the famous Paris Opera school and company, the French have done more than their share to unmoor la Danse from its traditions and standards.

  • We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically.

  • The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa 'Sleeping Beauty,' and no ballet is harder to get right.

  • The Sleeping Beauty' is the greatest, most challenging and most vulnerable of classical ballets. Everything can go wrong with it, and all too often, everything does.

  • Most famous stage actors tactfully fade away.

  • Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work.

  • City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis.

  • Has there ever been a dance career with more ups and downs than Twyla Tharp's? Or with more varied ambitions? Or larger ambition?

  • Shakespeare has always been up for grabs, and choreographers have every right to use him any way they choose.

  • In Georgia, apparently, men are men and women are women - at least in their folk dance.

  • Nothing is harder to create than brilliant comic ballets, except maybe brilliant full-evening comic ballets.

  • When December comes, can 'The Nutcracker' be far behind? No, it can't - not in America, anyway.

  • Classics are constantly being re-imagined and transformed, and the originals are none the worse for it; they endure.

  • What really matters is that 'Black Swan' deploys and exaggerates all the cliches of earlier ballet movies, especially 'The Red Shoes,' another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal.

  • Remember: TV is a format, film is a format, and books are a format.

  • Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.

  • Why movie and dance critics are taking 'The Company' seriously, I can't imagine. Are they impressed by Altman's reputation and naive sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach?

  • With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal.

  • Ocean's Kingdom' is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance - it's not about anything except its water-logged plot.

  • All ballet galas are unbearable, but they're unbearable in different ways.

  • For me, the real pleasure in writing is in having an excuse to pursue my curiosity about people who have meant something to me.

  • When December comes, can The Nutcracker be far behind? No, it cant - not in America, anyway.

  • As an editor, I have to be tactful, of course.

  • Blood is the leitmotif of 'Black Swan.'

  • In today's world, it never looks good when you're suing somebody who earned $20,000 for writing a book over a period of a year or two.

  • Twyla Tharp set her sights on ballet, and ballet, hungry for major talent, succumbed.

  • As ye sow, so shall ye reap. When a ballet company spends a lot of money on gimmicky pieces, it's stuck with them for a while - they have to earn their keep.

  • Soledad Barrio is clearly a master - of thrilling steps and passionate movement. She stalks, she circles, she struts, she snaps her head - her feet drill the stage.

  • Jodi Melnick is hotly self-absorbed. Her onstage musicians are much too loud, and like so many narcissistic performers, she goes on much too long: She's interested in herself; why wouldn't we be?

  • After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company - terrific dancers, awful repertory - I'm finally accepting the inevitable: I'm not going to change my mind, and they're not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world?

  • Beloved Renegade' is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying.

  • An editor has to be selfless, and yet has also to be strong-minded.

  • You don't have to be a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to figure out that when you title a memoir of your parents 'Them,' you're performing an act of distancing.

  • Beloved Renegade is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying.

  • The cows in Stella Gibbons's immortal 'Cold Comfort Farm' are named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, and that more or less is the verdict on 'Ocean's Kingdom,' the wildly hyped and wildly uninteresting collaboration between Peter Martins and Paul McCartney.

  • Black Swan' does what Hollywood movies have always done - it spends its energies on getting some surface things right while getting everything important wrong. Darren Aronofsky, the director, applies the same techniques and the same sensibility here as he did with 'The Wrestler,' only with a prettier protagonist.

  • Gelsey Kirkland has had more than her share of demons, as her two distressing memoirs - and her violently checkered career - attest.

  • The first movement ballerina should be a paradigm of strength and authority.

  • Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime choreographer, has put together an unspeakably dopey and incompetent mess called 'Call Me Ben,' combining ultra-generic dance, terrible dialogue and disastrous storytelling, about the founding of Las Vegas by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who insists, violently, on being addressed as 'Ben.'

  • Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.

  • Yes, bad or mediocre ballets can be useful to the dancers and temporarily fun for the audience, but in the long run, the lowering of standards can only erode the art form we all love.

  • 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is one of George Balanchine's greatest creations - and one of the greatest of all story ballets.

  • What guarantees - or at least semi-guarantees - good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground.

  • If you like being battered, the work of Savion Glover - one-time child prodigy - should be up your alley. I don't, and it isn't up mine.

  • Paris, as always, is swarming with Americans, and these days, it's also swarming with hamburgers. Oddly, though, it's not typically the Americans who are pursuing the perfect burger on the perfect bun with the obligatory side of perfect coleslaw; the Americans are pursuing the perfect blanquette de veau.

  • At a certain point, you have to face the fact that you've turned into an old fart.

  • The 1920s brought not only the Charleston but the flat chest.

  • The best seat in the house often depends on the ballet. For instance, much of the first act of 'The Nutcracker' is domestic and small scale, so it's great to sit up close. But the second act features elaborate scenery and choreography, which are better to observe from a distance.

  • Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.

  • The Iron Curtain may be a thing of the past, but Mother Russia is as mysterious as ever.

  • You have to surrender to a book. If you do, when something in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear.

  • Most writers are vulnerable and insecure, and Kay Graham was more so than most.

  • The mysteries and scandals of the Kremlin are nothing compared to the mysteries and scandals of the Bolshoi.

  • Raimund Hoghe is a little man with a spinal deformity who was once Pina Bausch's dramaturge.

  • The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art.

  • City Ballet has to develop choreographers of stature and a new approach to coaching before everything we value about it fades away and, in the great tradition of the Cheshire Cat, there's nothing left but Peter Martins' smile.

  • River of Light,' to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance.

  • Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1870, having produced fifteen novels, many of which can confidently be called great, as well as having accomplished outstanding work in activities into which his insatiable need to expend his vast energies - to achieve, to prevail - carried him: journalism, editing, acting, social reform.

  • It's a crapshoot, publishing.

  • We know how Merce Cunningham works and how he thinks - we've been told, over and over again, by him and by others.

  • For Russians, to whom Pushkin's poem 'Eugene Onegin' is sacred text, the ballet's story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, 'Romeo' and 'Hamlet' are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante.

  • Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification.

  • It's always fascinating - and sometimes a little disquieting - when two first-rate critics violently disagree.

  • Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who at one point or another went to Columbia, but there the similarity in their backgrounds ends.

  • Almost the first thing you see after entering the Houdini exhibition at the Jewish Museum is a large-screen film of Harry Houdini hanging by his ankles upside-down from a tall building, high over a sea of men in fedoras, and thrashing his way out of a straitjacket.

  • How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity.

  • With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, 'Bleak House' is, for many readers, Dickens's greatest novel.

  • The best thing you can say about Hubbard Street is that if you were a dancer, this is a company you'd fight to get into.

  • Writing happened to me. I didn't decide to start writing or to be a writer. I never wanted to be a writer.

  • Choreographers, historically, are born, not made - their talents drive them to it.

  • I don't like writing - it's so difficult to say what you mean. It's much easier to edit other people's writing and help them say what they mean.

  • Many people say to me, particularly about my dance writing, 'It sounds just like you.' But it sounds just like me after I've made it sound like me.

  • Diana Vishneva is not only a magnificent dancer but a magnificent actress - no one works harder or understands more.

  • I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives.

  • If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different.

  • Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.

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