Robert Gottlieb Quotations | Page 2

As for the once-revolutionary 'Agon,' after more than half a century, its lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional.

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

Audiences love Paul Taylor, and so do I. Not everything, and not always, but year in, year out, he gives me more concentrated pleasure than I get from any other dance company.

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.

Ballet Hispanico is far from Irish, and, though it has strong dancers, its Spanishness has always left me unconvinced.

Ballet Hispanico is a mixture of ethnic, ballet, social, jazz - you name it, it's doing it. The company has been going strong for more than 20 years, and you can see why: It may not be refined, but it's full of beans.

Ballet companies have their ups and downs, just like the rest of us.

Ballerinas are often divided into three categories: jumpers, turners and balancers.

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

Young women today, as in the fifties, find themselves entering the big world and having to make choices.

This case does not appear to be what it's been portrayed.

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.

A lot of people have a lot of faith in Karole Armitage. They see her as bold, inventive, indefatigable. 'America isn't working out? There's always Europe. Ballet? No? Go modern. Keep going! Show 'em!'

This is the right decision, and the judge should be commended.

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.

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

Dance Theatre of Harlem has done a lot of good things well, a lot of good things badly, and a lot of bad things - it doesn't matter how.

Dance stories, unlike those in opera, are usually simple.

Either 'Deuce Coupe' has aged badly, or I have. I suspect it's the latter.

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.

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

It was a basic story -- three or four or five girls start off together, one finds love, one goes crazy and/or dies, and one of them becomes a huge success -- but Rona's take was very up-to-date. What made it work for the time was that it had a fresh young-career-women-in-New York quality with a fillip of shock.

Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable.

The Kirov is a great ballet company because it has so many terrific dancers, but it doesn't always know what to do with them.

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

I have no problem selling ebooks for authors directly as an agent, but partnering with them is another matter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In my view, the ebook world for both established and new authors is a terrific new and exciting format. It is a format that will bring forth many new writers to publishing.

City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis.

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.

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

How can educated and sophisticated viewers react so differently to a work of art? Is it just Kulture Klash? No, since most of the time there's no Klash at all. On the occasions when we disagree, it may be because we're looking for different things in dance.

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

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

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

I can't claim to 'understand' 'Byzantium,' if any dance work can be 'understood,' but whenever I see it, I sense that it's charged with meaning.

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.

You can usually tell how healthy a ballet company is by the degree of your interest in the middle ranks of the dancers - the not-yet stars, the up-and-comers.

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.

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

The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki.

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

'The Leaves Are Fading' had something of a vogue when Antony Tudor made it in 1975, largely because of Gelsey Kirkland's ravishing performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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