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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Gelsey Kirkland has had more than her share of demons, as her two distressing memoirs - and her violently checkered career - attest.

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 early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art.

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.

Ballet Hispanico is far from Irish, and, though it has strong dancers, its Spanishness has always left me unconvinced.

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

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

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?

'The Leaves Are Fading' had something of a vogue when Antony Tudor made it in 1975, largely because of Gelsey Kirkland's ravishing performance.

Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable.

As for the once-revolutionary 'Agon,' after more than half a century, its lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional.

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

For Russians, to whom Pushkin's poem 'Eugene Onegin' is sacred text, the ballet's story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, 'Romeo' and 'Hamlet' are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante.

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

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.

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.

Acting has changed since the nineteen-forties.

Some readers took 'Heaven's My Destination' as a satire on Christianity and the Midwest, but today it reads like a loving comedy.

Paris, as always, is swarming with Americans, and these days, it's also swarming with hamburgers. Oddly, though, it's not typically the Americans who are pursuing the perfect burger on the perfect bun with the obligatory side of perfect coleslaw; the Americans are pursuing the perfect blanquette de veau.

Young women today, as in the fifties, find themselves entering the big world and having to make choices.

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

Twyla Tharp set her sights on ballet, and ballet, hungry for major talent, succumbed.

'Porgy and Bess' has never been thought of as a dance show, and yet it's filled with dance. It uses dance to punctuate the action, or as background, or as atmosphere; even when it's front and center, it isn't crucial.

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

What really matters is that 'Black Swan' deploys and exaggerates all the cliches of earlier ballet movies, especially 'The Red Shoes,' another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal.

'Black Swan' does what Hollywood movies have always done - it spends its energies on getting some surface things right while getting everything important wrong. Darren Aronofsky, the director, applies the same techniques and the same sensibility here as he did with 'The Wrestler,' only with a prettier protagonist.

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

Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime choreographer, has put together an unspeakably dopey and incompetent mess called 'Call Me Ben,' combining ultra-generic dance, terrible dialogue and disastrous storytelling, about the founding of Las Vegas by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who insists, violently, on being addressed as 'Ben.'

The truth is that all great men have had great mothers. Great women have had, as a rule, great fathers.

In order to appreciate a great man, we must know his surroundings. We must understand the scope of the drama in which he played - the part he acted - and we must also know his audience.

Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.

As long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power.

Every fact in the universe will fit every other fact in the universe. A lie never did, never will fit anything but another lie made to fit it. Never, never!

It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.

Voltaire lighted a torch and gave to others the sacred flame. The light still shines and will as long as man loves liberty and seeks for truth.

A good way to make children tell the truth is to tell it yourself. Keep your word with your child the same as you would with your banker.

If there is any God, there is only one way to please him, and that is by a conscientious discharge of your obligations to your fellow men.

Every good government is made up of good families. The unit of good government is the family, and anything that tends to destroy the family is perfectly devilish and infamous.

The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.

Our fathers knew that the flag was never intended to protect any man who wanted to assail it.

I will live by the standard of reason, and if thinking in accordance with reason takes me to perdition, then I will go to hell with my reason rather than to heaven without it.

Freedom has invented every useful machine, from the lowest to the highest, from the simplest to the most complex.

The place does not make the man, nor the sceptre the king. Greatness is from within.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.