“When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it’s the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.”

It’s not my job to look beautiful. It’s my job to look interesting.

It’s what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.

Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.

The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist. It is a miracle. And the dance is a celebration of that miracle.

The body says what words cannot.

Censorship is the height of vanity.

The reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.

My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.

Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.

I believe one thing: that today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and you can’t stop.

I believe that we learn by practice… it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

If you feel depressed you shouldn’t go out on the street because it will show on your face and you’ll give it to others. Misery is a communicable disease.

The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.

Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

A star can never die. It just turns into a smile and melts back into the cosmic music, the dance of life.

Life is found in the dance between your deepest desire and your greatest fear.

Aside from singing, I’m also a dancer. I’ve been dancing since I was 8.

Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

I think of most songs that way – if you can’t dance to a song, it’s not a song.