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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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