Top 101 Robert Gottlieb Quotes

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

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

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

Controversy sells books.

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

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.

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!’

Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable.

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.

There’s no point pretending that all of Martha Graham’s pieces are equally strong.

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.

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.

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.

‘Happy Feet’ has many felicities.

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.

‘Seven Sonatas,’ with its flowing series of meetings between men and women in an identifiable emotional world, is in the mould of Jerome Robbins’ glorious ‘Dances at a Gathering.’

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

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

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

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.

If Tom Clancy didn’t write any Op-Centers, he would be $60 million less rich.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Editing requires you to be always open, always responding. It is very important, for example, not to allow yourself to want the writer to write a certain kind of book. Sometimes that’s hard.

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.

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

‘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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Nobody could call the work of Noche Flamenca & Soledad Barrio pallid.

I can’t remember how many years it’s been since I last saw a David Parsons program or what I saw whenever it was, but that isn’t surprising, since I can’t really remember the first half of a David Parsons program while I’m watching the second half.

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.

‘Neverwhere,’ by Benjamin Millepied, is set to his favorite composer, Nico Muhly.

Some readers took ‘Heaven’s My Destination’ as a satire on Christianity and the Midwest, but today it reads like a loving comedy.

City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis.

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

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

Twyla Tharp is not going to take orders from anyone, not even Mozart!

‘Paquita’ has a patchy history, beginning in 1846, and a patchy plot.

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

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.

How the English love playing at being naughty boys!

You may feel that Peter Martins’ ‘Beauty’ is too compressed and inexpressive, but it’s loyal to the text.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a crapshoot, publishing.

A steady diet of the higher truths might prove exhausting, but it’s important that we acknowledge their validity and celebrate their survival.

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

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