“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.”

When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience.

So that we don’t go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak.

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.

Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.

I work as a dancer, but I also work as a choreographer with couples that have a lot of tension between them, and as dancer and as a choreographer, being in this situation is very difficult. You see the energy doesn’t flow, and it’s very tense.

A painter is a choreographer of space.

Mia Michaels is to my mind one of the most interesting choreographers alive right now and my colleague and my friend from So You Think (You Can Dance).

When the opportunity to choreograph came up, it was nothing more in my head but an opportunity. Then it suddenly became a career very quickly.

Badminton is like ballet dancing. It requires a lot of control, strength, mind play and measured movement