Robert Gottlieb Quotes

Enjoy the top 145 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Robert Gottlieb.

“Eclipse is overlong and overly self-conscious, but it isnt a fake or a zero; it just gets exhausting. It raises a crucial question: When does Concept morph into Gimmick?”
— Robert Gottlieb —

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

— Robert Gottlieb

“'Eclipse' is overlong and overly self-conscious, but it isn't a fake or a zero; it just gets exhausting. It raises a crucial question: 'When does Concept morph into Gimmick?'”

— Robert Gottlieb

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

— Robert Gottlieb

“One of the eternal mysteries of ballet is how untalented choreographers find backers for their work, and then find good dancers to perform in it. Is it irresistible charm? Chutzpah? Pure determination? Blackmail? Or are so many supposedly knowledgeable people just plain blind?”

— Robert Gottlieb

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

— Robert Gottlieb

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

— Robert Gottlieb

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

— Robert Gottlieb

“Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.”

— Robert Gottlieb

The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki.

— Robert Gottlieb

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

— Robert Gottlieb

Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who at one point or another went to Columbia, but there the similarity in their backgrounds ends.

— Robert Gottlieb

“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

“I was the only child, and I know my father had certain thoughts about me. He was a lawyer and extremely literary, but he would have been much happier if I had wanted to be a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer. But what I wanted to do was read.”

— 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

“Ballet companies have their ups and downs, just like the rest of us.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“Most writers are vulnerable and insecure, and Kay Graham was more so than most.”

— Robert Gottlieb

We know that Diana Vishneva is a phenomenon of strength and style, and she certainly has earned the right to stretch her talents as best she can.

— Robert Gottlieb

“'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is one of George Balanchine's greatest creations - and one of the greatest of all story ballets.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“All ballet galas are unbearable, but they're unbearable in different ways.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“Ballerinas are often divided into three categories: jumpers, turners and balancers.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“Choreographers, historically, are born, not made - their talents drive them to it.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“Classics are constantly being re-imagined and transformed, and the originals are none the worse for it; they endure.”

— 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

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

— Robert Gottlieb

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

— Robert Gottlieb

“'Happy Feet' has many felicities.”

— Robert Gottlieb

Has there ever been a dance career with more ups and downs than Twyla Tharp's? Or with more varied ambitions? Or larger ambition?

— Robert Gottlieb

I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight.

— 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

“If Tom Clancy didn't write any Op-Centers, he would be $60 million less rich.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor.”

— Robert Gottlieb

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

— Robert Gottlieb

“Nothing is harder to create than brilliant comic ballets, except maybe brilliant full-evening comic ballets.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“Raimund Hoghe is a little man with a spinal deformity who was once Pina Bausch's dramaturge.”

— Robert Gottlieb

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

— Robert Gottlieb

“The best thing you can say about Hubbard Street is that if you were a dancer, this is a company you'd fight to get into.”

— Robert Gottlieb

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

— Robert Gottlieb

“There is no consolation for anyone in the Scott Peterson story, and no final illumination.”

— Robert Gottlieb

What guarantees - or at least semi-guarantees - good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground.

— Robert Gottlieb

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

“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

“Audiences love Paul Taylor, and so do I. Not everything, and not always, but year in, year out, he gives me more concentrated pleasure than I get from any other dance company.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“'Empty Moves' is elegantly and coolly inventive. Two pairs of dancers shadow each other in slow, deliberate rearrangements and manipulations of legs and torsos, only occasionally switching partners or breaking free of the formal patterning.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“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.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“In traditional 'Swan Lakes,' it's Prince Siegfried's 21st-birthday celebration, his coming-of-age. The entire court, from his mother the Queen on down, is on hand.”

— Robert Gottlieb

“Just as I was turning fifteen, in the spring of 1946, my parents took me to see 'The Glass Menagerie,' well into its year-long run. I had seen a number of shows on Broadway by then, but nothing like this - because there was nothing like this on Broadway.”