Top 100 Robert Gottlieb Quotes
#1. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#2. 'Beloved Renegade' is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying.
Robert Gottlieb
#4. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#5. It's always fascinating - and sometimes a little disquieting - when two first-rate critics violently disagree.
Robert Gottlieb
#6. I was the only child, and I know my father had certain thoughts about me. He was a lawyer and extremely literary, but he would have been much happier if I had wanted to be a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer. But what I wanted to do was read.
Robert Gottlieb
#7. 'The Leaves Are Fading' had something of a vogue when Antony Tudor made it in 1975, largely because of Gelsey Kirkland's ravishing performance.
Robert Gottlieb
#8. The eternal and uneasy relationship between ballet and modern dance endures, but radically altered in tone and intensity.
Robert Gottlieb
#9. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#10. Of the great singing stars of the 1940s and '50s, only one - Nat King Cole - died young, at age 45.
Robert Gottlieb
#11. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#12. Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.
Robert Gottlieb
#13. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#14. Either 'Deuce Coupe' has aged badly, or I have. I suspect it's the latter.
Robert Gottlieb
#15. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#16. How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity.
Robert Gottlieb
#17. Remember: TV is a format, film is a format, and books are a format.
Robert Gottlieb
#18. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#19. At a certain point, you have to face the fact that you've turned into an old fart.
Robert Gottlieb
#20. Twyla Tharp is not going to take orders from anyone, not even Mozart!
Robert Gottlieb
#21. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#22. Shakespeare has always been up for grabs, and choreographers have every right to use him any way they choose.
Robert Gottlieb
#23. Ladies: You have to support an infant with a hand under its head.
Robert Gottlieb
#24. Nobody could call the work of Noche Flamenca & Soledad Barrio pallid.
Robert Gottlieb
#25. Dance stories, unlike those in opera, are usually simple.
Robert Gottlieb
#26. Some readers took 'Heaven's My Destination' as a satire on Christianity and the Midwest, but today it reads like a loving comedy.
Robert Gottlieb
#27. The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa 'Sleeping Beauty,' and no ballet is harder to get right.
Robert Gottlieb
#28. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#29. Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work.
Robert Gottlieb
#30. '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?'
Robert Gottlieb
#31. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#32. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#33. 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!'
Robert Gottlieb
#34. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#35. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#36. The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art.
Robert Gottlieb
#37. Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance.
Robert Gottlieb
#38. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#40. Gelsey Kirkland has had more than her share of demons, as her two distressing memoirs - and her violently checkered career - attest.
Robert Gottlieb
#41. 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?
Robert Gottlieb
#42. '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.'
Robert Gottlieb
#43. 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is one of George Balanchine's greatest creations - and one of the greatest of all story ballets.
Robert Gottlieb
#44. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#45. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#46. 'River of Light,' to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance.
Robert Gottlieb
#47. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#48. Nothing is harder to create than brilliant comic ballets, except maybe brilliant full-evening comic ballets.
Robert Gottlieb
#49. '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.
Robert Gottlieb
#50. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#52. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#53. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#54. Ballet Hispanico is far from Irish, and, though it has strong dancers, its Spanishness has always left me unconvinced.
Robert Gottlieb
#55. An editor has to be selfless, and yet has also to be strong-minded.
Robert Gottlieb
#56. We know how Merce Cunningham works and how he thinks - we've been told, over and over again, by him and by others.
Robert Gottlieb
#57. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#58. Writing happened to me. I didn't decide to start writing or to be a writer. I never wanted to be a writer.
Robert Gottlieb
#59. 'Ocean's Kingdom' is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance - it's not about anything except its water-logged plot.
Robert Gottlieb
#60. Most writers are vulnerable and insecure, and Kay Graham was more so than most.
Robert Gottlieb
#61. The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki.
Robert Gottlieb
#62. 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?
Robert Gottlieb
#63. Choreographers, historically, are born, not made - their talents drive them to it.
Robert Gottlieb
#64. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#65. 'Porgy and Bess' has never been thought of as a dance show, and yet it's filled with dance. It uses dance to punctuate the action, or as background, or as atmosphere; even when it's front and center, it isn't crucial.
Robert Gottlieb
#66. Young women today, as in the fifties, find themselves entering the big world and having to make choices.
Robert Gottlieb
#67. Classics are constantly being re-imagined and transformed, and the originals are none the worse for it; they endure.
Robert Gottlieb
#68. Ballet companies have their ups and downs, just like the rest of us.
Robert Gottlieb
#70. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#71. When you can't follow a ballet's action, you can always read the program notes.
Robert Gottlieb
#72. The Iron Curtain may be a thing of the past, but Mother Russia is as mysterious as ever.
Robert Gottlieb
#73. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#74. For me, the real pleasure in writing is in having an excuse to pursue my curiosity about people who have meant something to me.
Robert Gottlieb
#75. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#76. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#77. Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.
Robert Gottlieb
#78. When December comes, can 'The Nutcracker' be far behind? No, it can't - not in America, anyway.
Robert Gottlieb
#79. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#80. If Tom Clancy didn't write any Op-Centers, he would be $60 million less rich.
Robert Gottlieb
#81. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#82. There's no point pretending that all of Martha Graham's pieces are equally strong.
Robert Gottlieb
#83. I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives.
Robert Gottlieb
#84. The first movement ballerina should be a paradigm of strength and authority.
Robert Gottlieb
#85. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#86. In Georgia, apparently, men are men and women are women - at least in their folk dance.
Robert Gottlieb
#87. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#88. We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically.
Robert Gottlieb
#89. Schumann's 'Quintet in E flat for Piano and Strings' is one of the sublime moments in Romantic music.
Robert Gottlieb
#90. Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.
Robert Gottlieb
#91. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#92. I first read 'An American Tragedy' in college, and in my entire life I had never read anything so painful.
Robert Gottlieb
#93. Ballerinas are often divided into three categories: jumpers, turners and balancers.
Robert Gottlieb
#95. A steady diet of the higher truths might prove exhausting, but it's important that we acknowledge their validity and celebrate their survival.
Robert Gottlieb
#96. 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?
Robert Gottlieb
#97. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#98. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#99. 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.
Robert Gottlieb
#100. What guarantees - or at least semi-guarantees - good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground.
Robert Gottlieb
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