Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Paris

Famous

Done

" 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. "

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

" How can educated and sophisticated viewers react so differently to a work of art? Is it just Kulture Klash? No, since most of the time there's no Klash at all. On the occasions when we disagree, it may be because we're looking for different things in dance. "

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

" It's a crapshoot, publishing. "

Robert Gottlieb

Publishing

Crapshoot

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

Robert Gottlieb

Ideal

World

" Schumann's 'Quintet in E flat for Piano and Strings' is one of the sublime moments in Romantic music. "

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

You

Book

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I hated Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned. "

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

" There's no point pretending that all of Martha Graham's pieces are equally strong. "

" The first movement ballerina should be a paradigm of strength and authority. "

" 'Paquita' has a patchy history, beginning in 1846, and a patchy plot. "

" Nobody could call the work of Noche Flamenca & Soledad Barrio pallid. "

" We know how Merce Cunningham works and how he thinks - we've been told, over and over again, by him and by others. "

" 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. "

" The best thing you can say about Hubbard Street is that if you were a dancer, this is a company you'd fight to get into. "

" '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

" '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. "

" Twyla Tharp is not going to take orders from anyone, not even Mozart! "

" The 1920s brought not only the Charleston but the flat chest. "

" 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. "

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

" Most famous stage actors tactfully fade away. "

" 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. "

" If you like being battered, the work of Savion Glover - one-time child prodigy - should be up your alley. I don't, and it isn't up mine. "

Robert Gottlieb

You

Work

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