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

I had had to learn the difference between the bearable fatigue and the unbearable, the fatigue of fear. The first can be cured by a night’s sleep; the second kills.

Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they’re afraid that they’ll be forgotten. And in America they’re quite right. They will be.

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.

Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.

I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.

We didn’t have money for a babysitter, so she always brought me with her to the dancing school. Back then, I was already watching and listening to Michael Jackson for a long time.

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

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.

If you want to understand a nation, look at its dances and listen to its folk songs – don’t pay any attention to its politicians.

Well hip hop is basically the whole culture of the movement. There’s the rap which is a form of hip hop culture.

It could be breakdancing, freestyle dancing or whatever type of dancing that’s happening now in the Black, Hispanic and White community.