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

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.

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.

When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.

If the whole of mankind is to be united into one brotherhood, all obstacles must be removed so that men, all over the surface of the globe, should be as children playing in a garden.

Speech is one of the marvels that characterize man, and also one of the most difficult spontaneous creations that have been accomplished by nature.

As a child, I was aware of the widely-held attitude that the ocean is so big, so resilient that we could use the sea as the ultimate place to dispose of anything.

I was an illegitimate, well, I still am an illegitimate child.

Success is the child of audacity.

Even as a child, I found a way to survive.

I have a great need for affection from an audience. I don’t know whether this is because I had such a tough life when I was a child.