I hated Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned.
— Robert Gottlieb
The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art.
If you like being battered, the work of Savion Glover - one-time child prodigy - should be up your alley. I don't, and it isn't up mine.
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.
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.
There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.
No agent/publisher is in a position to create across a spectrum of media and distribution what major publishers can accomplish for authors.
At a certain point, you have to face the fact that you've turned into an old fart.
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.
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.
Almost the first thing you see after entering the Houdini exhibition at the Jewish Museum is a large-screen film of Harry Houdini hanging by his ankles upside-down from a tall building, high over a sea of men in fedoras, and thrashing his way out of a straitjacket.
We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically.
If Tom Clancy didn't write any Op-Centers, he would be $60 million less rich.
Dance stories, unlike those in opera, are usually simple.
Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor.
Writing happened to me. I didn't decide to start writing or to be a writer. I never wanted to be a writer.
Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance.
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.
The mysteries and scandals of the Kremlin are nothing compared to the mysteries and scandals of the Bolshoi.
Editing requires you to be always open, always responding. It is very important, for example, not to allow yourself to want the writer to write a certain kind of book. Sometimes that's hard.
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.
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.
I have no problem selling ebooks for authors directly as an agent, but partnering with them is another matter.
Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.
For me, the real pleasure in writing is in having an excuse to pursue my curiosity about people who have meant something to me.
How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity.
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.
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.
Controversy sells books.
The best seat in the house often depends on the ballet. For instance, much of the first act of 'The Nutcracker' is domestic and small scale, so it's great to sit up close. But the second act features elaborate scenery and choreography, which are better to observe from a distance.
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.
I can't remember how many years it's been since I last saw a David Parsons program or what I saw whenever it was, but that isn't surprising, since I can't really remember the first half of a David Parsons program while I'm watching the second half.
Gelsey Kirkland has had more than her share of demons, as her two distressing memoirs - and her violently checkered career - attest.
In today's world, it never looks good when you're suing somebody who earned $20,000 for writing a book over a period of a year or two.
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.
Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1870, having produced fifteen novels, many of which can confidently be called great, as well as having accomplished outstanding work in activities into which his insatiable need to expend his vast energies - to achieve, to prevail - carried him: journalism, editing, acting, social reform.
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.
We all need each other in publishing to make publishing work for authors in a variety of formats now and in the future. Anyone who thinks publishers don't bring anything to the table has a very narrow view and lack of knowledge about the industry as a whole.
I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight.
Many people say to me, particularly about my dance writing, 'It sounds just like you.' But it sounds just like me after I've made it sound like me.
Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.
It's a crapshoot, publishing.
Remember: TV is a format, film is a format, and books are a format.
As an editor, I have to be tactful, of course.
Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.
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.
