“We are all of us, unique – each a unique pattern of creativity and if we do not fulfill it, it is lost for all time.”

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.

I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.

I want to make people feel intensely alive. I’d rather have them against me than indifferent.

Dancers are the messengers of the gods.

We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.

I get up, I fall down, all the while I am dancing.

I am certain that movement never lies. There is only one law of posture I have been able to discover – the perpendicular line connecting heaven and earth.

Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.

The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it. Learn by practice.

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

The past is not dead; it is not even past. People live on inner time; the moment in which a decisive thought or feeling takes place can be at any time. Timeless feelings are common to all of us.

All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.

My solution to the problem of unleashing creativity is always to set up a target.

I consider it my job to nurture the creativity of the people I work with because at Sony we know that a terrific idea is more likely to happen in an open, free and trusting atmosphere than when everything is calculated.

(Japanese Government believes that if you have a big laboratory with all the latest equipment and good funding it will automatically lead to creativity. It doesn’t work that way.

Curiosity is the key to creativity.

My solution to the problem of unleashing creativity is always to set up a target.

Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining.

But I love stand-up, and it’s where I came from creatively, so it’s something I never want to walk away from.

Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.