It's always fascinating - and sometimes a little disquieting - when two first-rate critics violently disagree.

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.

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.

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.

I have no problem selling ebooks for authors directly as an agent, but partnering with them is another matter.

'River of Light,' to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance.

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?

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.

You may feel that Peter Martins' 'Beauty' is too compressed and inexpressive, but it's loyal to the text.

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

Most famous stage actors tactfully fade away.

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.

It's a crapshoot, publishing.

'Ocean's Kingdom' is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance - it's not about anything except its water-logged plot.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.

'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.

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.

No agent/publisher is in a position to create across a spectrum of media and distribution what major publishers can accomplish for authors.

The mystery of Christopher Wheeldon deepens. Yes, he's the most talented of the younger ballet choreographers - indeed, where's the competition? Yes, he's particularly good at nurturing dancers and identifying their essential qualities.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 have been much happier if I had wanted to be a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer. But what I wanted to do was read.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.