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" When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills. "

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" The cows in Stella Gibbons's immortal 'Cold Comfort Farm' are named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, and that more or less is the verdict on 'Ocean's Kingdom,' the wildly hyped and wildly uninteresting collaboration between Peter Martins and Paul McCartney. "

Robert Gottlieb

Ocean

Farm

Comfort

" A lot of people have a lot of faith in Karole Armitage. They see her as bold, inventive, indefatigable. 'America isn't working out? There's always Europe. Ballet? No? Go modern. Keep going! Show 'em!' "

" 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. "

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

" I don't like writing - it's so difficult to say what you mean. It's much easier to edit other people's writing and help them say what they mean. "

" '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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" It's a crapshoot, publishing. "

Robert Gottlieb

Publishing

Crapshoot

" Diana Vishneva is not only a magnificent dancer but a magnificent actress - no one works harder or understands more. "

Robert Gottlieb

Magnificent

Harder

" Young women today, as in the fifties, find themselves entering the big world and having to make choices. "

" How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity. "

" 'The Leaves Are Fading' had something of a vogue when Antony Tudor made it in 1975, largely because of Gelsey Kirkland's ravishing performance. "

" Paris, as always, is swarming with Americans, and these days, it's also swarming with hamburgers. Oddly, though, it's not typically the Americans who are pursuing the perfect burger on the perfect bun with the obligatory side of perfect coleslaw; the Americans are pursuing the perfect blanquette de veau. "

" Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance. "

" In my view, the ebook world for both established and new authors is a terrific new and exciting format. It is a format that will bring forth many new writers to publishing. "

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

" Every great dance company, even when it seems poised in perfect balance, needs constant renewal of both repertory and performers. "

" I first read 'An American Tragedy' in college, and in my entire life I had never read anything so painful. "

" 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. "

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

Robert Gottlieb

Far

Dancers

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

Robert Gottlieb

Editors

Assume

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification. "