Robert Gottlieb Quotes

Author Image

Robert Gottlieb

Profession : Writer

Birth : April 29, 1931

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

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

Controversy sells books.

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

Remember: TV is a format, film is a format, and books are a format.

Robert Gottlieb

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.

Robert Gottlieb

We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically.

Robert Gottlieb

It's a crapshoot, publishing.

Robert Gottlieb

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.

Robert Gottlieb

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.

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

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.

Robert Gottlieb

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.

Robert Gottlieb

For me, the real pleasure in writing is in having an excuse to pursue my curiosity about people who have meant something to me.

Robert Gottlieb

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.

Robert Gottlieb

I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight.

Robert Gottlieb

Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.

Robert Gottlieb

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.

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb