Quotes from Robert Gottlieb

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?

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

The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa 'Sleeping Beauty,' and no ballet is harder to get right.

How the English love playing at being naughty boys!

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!'

Of the great singing stars of the 1940s and '50s, only one - Nat King Cole - died young, at age 45.

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

Ladies: You have to support an infant with a hand under its head.

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

'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?'

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.

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.

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

No agent/publisher is in a position to create across a spectrum of media and distribution what major publishers can accomplish for authors.

Raimund Hoghe is a little man with a spinal deformity who was once Pina Bausch's dramaturge.

'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.'

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

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

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

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.

'River of Light,' to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance.

One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great.

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