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

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.

Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down… and kissed him. And the world cracked open.

I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.

What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.

Ours is an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat. It keeps pressing us to go farther, to include everything so that we can savor everything, so that we can know everything.

But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises.

Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how… The artists never entirely knows.

Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.

Find the passion. It takes great passion and great energy to do anything creative. I would go so far as to say you can’t do it without that passion.

Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.

The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind.

No white man uses his feet the way an Indian does. He talks to the earth.

To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.

The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.

Dancing is such a despised and dishonored trade that if you tell a doctor or a laywer you do choreography he’ll look at you as if you were a hummingbird.

The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it.

Summer-induced stupidity. That was the diagnosis.

There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania.

One reason for making and exhibiting a work is to induce a reaction or change in the viewer.