Robert Gottlieb Quotes

66 quotes in 808 categories

• If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different.
• An editor has to be selfless, and yet has also to be strong-minded.
• I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives.
• 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,…
• Martha Graham, along with George Balanchine, is one of the two commanding figures in 20th-century American dance. For those much younger than I am, her…
• How the English love playing at being naughty boys!
• In Georgia, apparently, men are men and women are women - at least in their folk dance.
• Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.
• Dance stories, unlike those in opera, are usually simple.
• As an editor, I have to be tactful, of course.
• Controversy sells books.
• Remember: TV is a format, film is a format, and books are a format.
• We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically.
• 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…
• Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.
• How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity.
• For me, the real pleasure in writing is in having an excuse to pursue my curiosity about people who have meant something to me.
• 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…
• I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight.
• Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.

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