Robert Gottlieb

You don't have to be a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to figure out that when you title a memoir of your parents 'Them,' you're performing an act of distancing.

It's a crapshoot, publishing.

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

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.

Remember: TV is a format, film is a format, and books are a format.

Controversy sells books.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The first movement ballerina should be a paradigm of strength and authority.

Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work.

'Eclipse' is a concept piece, and its concept centers on 36 large light bulbs strung from above in a geometrical pattern and at different heights, some of them at times down below the dancers' chest level.

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

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.

Jodi Melnick is hotly self-absorbed. Her onstage musicians are much too loud, and like so many narcissistic performers, she goes on much too long: She's interested in herself; why wouldn't we be?

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.