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" It's always fascinating - and sometimes a little disquieting - when two first-rate critics violently disagree. "

Robert Gottlieb

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" 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

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

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

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

Robert Gottlieb

" Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1870, having produced fifteen novels, many of which can confidently be called great, as well as having accomplished outstanding work in activities into which his insatiable need to expend his vast energies - to achieve, to prevail - carried him: journalism, editing, acting, social reform. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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? "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

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

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

" 'Eclipse' is a concept piece, and its concept centers on 36 large light bulbs strung from above in a geometrical pattern and at different heights, some of them at times down below the dancers' chest level. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" '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

" 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

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

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

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

Robert Gottlieb

" Most famous stage actors tactfully fade away. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

" The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

" Gelsey Kirkland has had more than her share of demons, as her two distressing memoirs - and her violently checkered career - attest. "

Robert Gottlieb

" '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