Quotes from Robert Gottlieb

in contemporary modern music, the working out is so intellectual that the extempore act does not give the modernist time to concoct anything he himself would consider significant

So how can you say Jazz started in whorehouses when the musicianers didn't have no real need for them?

One suspects that the haste with which some performers and some writers brush aside the traditional-jazz renaissance reflects their understanding of the devastating effect that an insistence on the traditional values would have upon the world of modern jazz to which they belong

love-making and good food are the essential ingredients of life

When you can't follow a ballet's action, you can always read the program notes.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

It's a crapshoot, publishing.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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