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" Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean. "

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" To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art. "

" 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. "

" Most 'Monty Python' fans are, of course, baby boomers, who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age. "

" I loved music from earliest childhood - from as long as I can remember. "

" 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. "

" The script of a play is not a finished product: It's a set of instructions. "

" The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall. "

" Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original. "

" I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so. "

" Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way. "

" I don't know anybody in the opera business who isn't worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock. "

" It's said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black and white. If this is so, I suspect it's because such films portray an America that no longer exists. "

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" The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck. "

" The first play I ever saw - I was in junior high school - was a high school production of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit,' which seemed to me absolutely magical. "

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

" In a world without any criticism at all, although there are many actors who would think they would be delighted to see that happen, would in fact be a far more problematic world than they could ever imagine. "

" In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out. "

" Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree. "

" 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. "

" Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I'd issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called 'The American Experience in Art.' "

" There's a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "