Daily Inspiration Quote by John Guare

“All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs” is theater-kid hyperbole sharpened into criticism that lands as praise. Guare, a playwright with a feel for American talk, raids baseball’s most democratic metaphor to describe an art form often coded as rarefied. That’s the first trick: he drags ballet off the pedestal and drops it into the ballpark, where performance is judged by results, timing, and the crowd’s intake of breath.

The line also flatters New York City Ballet in a very specific way. A home run isn’t just excellence; it’s decisiveness. No messy argument with the ump, no ambiguous “interesting” experiment, no noble failure. Guare implies a company so consistently on its game that even its risks resolve into payoff. The word “beautiful” matters: he’s not talking about brute force or athletic domination, but an aesthetic that still reads as inevitable, clean, and legible.

Subtextually, it’s a sly jab at the broader arts ecosystem where audiences are trained to accept unevenness as the price of ambition. Guare’s framing suggests NYCB makes difficulty look like pleasure - a kind of virtuosity that conceals labor and therefore feels, to the viewer, like pure momentum. Coming from a playwright, there’s another quiet compliment: ballet here is dramaturgy without dialogue, narrative satisfaction without plot, an evening that keeps delivering the thing audiences secretly want - the thrill of certainty.