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

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

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

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

" Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Either 'Deuce Coupe' has aged badly, or I have. I suspect it's the latter. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" There are certain historical figures of such importance that we need to know everything about them, which is why books about Napoleon, Lincoln, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, and the great religious founders continue to proliferate; these lives require constant reevaluation and interpretation. "

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

" Of the great singing stars of the 1940s and '50s, only one - Nat King Cole - died young, at age 45. "

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

" Martha Graham, along with George Balanchine, is one of the two commanding figures in 20th-century American dance. For those much younger than I am, her genius as a performer will have to be taken on faith - and on the always-suspect evidence of film. What will last, if things go well, is her genius as a choreographer, as a woman of the theater. "

Robert Gottlieb

" You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 'Beloved Renegade' is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying. "

Robert Gottlieb

" The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art. "

Robert Gottlieb

" We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Blood is the leitmotif of 'Black Swan.' "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" The eternal and uneasy relationship between ballet and modern dance endures, but radically altered in tone and intensity. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Writing happened to me. I didn't decide to start writing or to be a writer. I never wanted to be a writer. "

Robert Gottlieb

" With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 'Black Swan' does what Hollywood movies have always done - it spends its energies on getting some surface things right while getting everything important wrong. Darren Aronofsky, the director, applies the same techniques and the same sensibility here as he did with 'The Wrestler,' only with a prettier protagonist. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 'Ocean's Kingdom' is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance - it's not about anything except its water-logged plot. "

Robert Gottlieb

" When December comes, can 'The Nutcracker' be far behind? No, it can't - not in America, anyway. "

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

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb