“Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.”

Dance in the body you have.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don’t even look at one another.

Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.

What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.

From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.

We can’t stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.

There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.

Dancers aren’t made of their technique, but their passion.

This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.

I think ought to have more and correct some of the matters fate fails to take care of.

The practice mirror is to be used for the correction of faults, not for a love affair, and the figure you watch should not become your dearest friend.

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.

Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession.

The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one’s feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.

The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.

They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.

Almost every cartoonist, when he’s sitting down to draw a funny face.

You could almost call them marriages, even though I didn’t marry. But it was costly.

I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan.

My early career was a real rush of movies and stardom – it was almost overwhelming.

Sometimes you are going to miss a person who was an almost to you. And feel sad because there is no name for that feeling. You just feel it in a way that makes you tired to your very bones.

I’ve been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

If you can build a powerful brand, you will have a powerful marketing program.

It’s almost as important as Shakespeare’s to be or not to be which deals with death.