Robert Gottlieb Quotes

At age 14, coming to the U.S., all I knew was American Ballet Theatre, Baryshnikov, Nureyev, and some of the European companies. I barely knew anything about Balanchine.

And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.

I usually don't write about my life right when it happens. I process it, and I store it away. Then, when I get in the mood I pull the stuff back out.

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.

Sometimes I write from personal experience, but so much depends on what mood I'm in. If I'm in a good mood, I'll write happier songs.

Whatever is going on in your life when you're writing has to somehow seep into your work.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.

One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

When you're writing, it's rather like going on a very long walk

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

I think that, when you're writing your songs, there's always a debate about whether, is that you in the song? Is it not you in the song?

I've never liked songs that are about writing, or struggling to write. Maybe it's because it's too relatable to me.

I only write about stuff I know. I don't have a lot of experience with boys and stuff so I write a lot of songs about interesting and strange subjects that people wouldn't write songs about.

I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.