“A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.”

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.

Dance constitutes a true recapturing of… freedom and childish play.

To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea.

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

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

great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions.

I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.

The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.

Dancers don’t get invited to visit people. It is assumed a boy dancer will run off with the spoons and a girl with the head of the house.

I learned three important things in college-to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes.

I have a lot of intention behind what I put out there. The reason all this stuff I do works together, the environmental and social, collaborating with ballet companies to score a show, the bike tour – all of that stuff comes together through community building with music.

When I’m doing well, it’s like I’m in a nice little ballet. Everything is going slow all around me. It’s very peaceful.

I’ve never danced professionally as a ballet dancer, but all of my training is ballet, and I am a Fosse dancer.

It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.

I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.

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

Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible

I started with ballet and then my cousin Sarah introduced me to her tap teachers.