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" I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto. "

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" Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher. "

" David Cromer, from Chicago, I think is the most gifted young director in America. "

" For the critic, the word 'best' is like a grenade without a pin: Toss it around too freely, and you're likely to get your hand blown off. "

" Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others. "

" No translation can possibly be perfect. Every production and every performance is a different path up the mountain, and nobody ever makes it all the way to the summit. "

" Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers. "

" A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself. "

" Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets. "

" Fred Astaire never let you see him sweat, but he sweetened his deceptively casual virtuosity with just enough charm to make it irresistible. "

" Unlike film, live theater is an anti-naturalistic medium in which character is mainly illuminated through speech and movement. "

" Anna Deavere Smith's new one-woman show bills itself as being about health care, but the truth is that 'Let Me Down Easy' is mostly about the grimmer subject of death and dying. "

" The contemporary notion that it's somehow inherently bad for a film to be 'talky' has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood. "

" Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood. "

" In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are. "

" The good news is that 'High School Musical' seems to be getting a lot of youngsters excited about theater. "

" Nowadays, most educated people would just as soon stay home and watch 'Breaking Bad' as shell out a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play - assuming that there are any plays on Broadway worth seeing, which long ago ceased to be a safe bet. "

" The backstage play, in which the private lives of theater people are put onstage for the world to see, is one of the diciest of dramatic genres. "

" I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people. "

" Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn't a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special. "

" You don't have to know anything about the Shakers to appreciate Mr. Copland's score for 'Appalachian Spring' any more than you have to know who William Randolph Hearst was to understand 'Citizen Kane.' "

" What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns. "

" Nobody reads a reference book to be amused, much less charmed. "

" What's the funniest play ever written? I used to think it was 'Noises Off,' but now that I've seen 'The Liar,' I'm not so sure. "

" Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music. "

" Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz. "

" I can remember - barely - when Elton John was still a good songwriter, or at least capable of writing good songs. "

" Well into the '40s, it wasn't uncommon for big-budget Hollywood movies to contain little or no underscoring, and many of today's directors, following the lead of Martin Scorsese in 'GoodFellas,' accompany their films with pop records, not original music. "

" The setting of 'Billy Elliot' is the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing. "

" Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as 'Stardust' and 'The Christmas Song' that it's hard to imagine anyone else performing them. "

" It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art. "