Quotes from Robert Gottlieb

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis.

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

There is no consolation for anyone in the Scott Peterson story, and no final illumination.

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.

'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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I first read 'An American Tragedy' in college, and in my entire life I had never read anything so painful.

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.

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