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

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.

So that we will miss nothing. Partly it’s greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.

Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible