Feel Quotes

It's a crapshoot, publishing.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Publishing

'Happy Feet' has many felicities.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Many Happy Feet

As an editor, I have to be tactful, of course.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Course Editor

Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: About Something Once

'Neverwhere,' by Benjamin Millepied, is set to his favorite composer, Nico Muhly.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: His Favorite Composer

Dance stories, unlike those in opera, are usually simple.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Those Stories Simple

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

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Either Badly Suspect

The mysteries and scandals of the Kremlin are nothing compared to the mysteries and scandals of the Bolshoi.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Nothing Compared Mysteries

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

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: You Always Read

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

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Relationship Much Without

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

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: More Only Works

At a certain point, you have to face the fact that you've turned into an old fart.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: You Old Fact

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

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Thing Ever May

Shakespeare has always been up for grabs, and choreographers have every right to use him any way they choose.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Up Always Been

Gelsey Kirkland has had more than her share of demons, as her two distressing memoirs - and her violently checkered career - attest.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: More Had Than

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

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Life Had Never

Some readers took 'Heaven's My Destination' as a satire on Christianity and the Midwest, but today it reads like a loving comedy.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Like Some Today

'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

Tags: Beauty Go Most

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

Tags: You More Going

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.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Good You Any

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

Tags: War Peace People

Paul Taylor's 'Offenbach Overtures' has lots of zip and charm, and its pair of dueling soldiers in red, who end up starry-eyed about each other while their disgusted seconds take up the quarrel, is nonstop funny.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Funny About Who

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

Tags: Good Respect About

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.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Who Always Also

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.

Robert Gottlieb

Tags: Know Way Us

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

Tags: Time Work Just

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

Tags: Change About World