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" Audiences love Paul Taylor, and so do I. Not everything, and not always, but year in, year out, he gives me more concentrated pleasure than I get from any other dance company. "

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" 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

America

Lake

First Time

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 'Empty Moves' is elegantly and coolly inventive. Two pairs of dancers shadow each other in slow, deliberate rearrangements and manipulations of legs and torsos, only occasionally switching partners or breaking free of the formal patterning. "

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

" Controversy sells books. "

" Choreographers, historically, are born, not made - their talents drive them to it. "

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

" Ballet companies have their ups and downs, just like the rest of us. "

Robert Gottlieb

Ballet

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In 1998, Vanity Fair asked me to write a big piece for them on the 50th anniversary of the New York City Ballet. My life, to a great extent, had been spent at and with the New York City Ballet, and I decided to try it. It was very scary, writing about something I loved so much and had such strong opinions about. "

" 'Neverwhere,' by Benjamin Millepied, is set to his favorite composer, Nico Muhly. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" '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 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

Sleeping

Wrong

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

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

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

" Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet's ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at. "

" 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. "

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