“I want to make people feel intensely alive. I’d rather have them against me than indifferent.”

What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.

The gesture is the thing truly expressive of the individual – as we think so will we act.

Misery is a communicable disease.

Repetition not for monotony but the ecstasy it induces.

It’s not my job to look beautiful. It’s my job to look interesting.

It’s what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.

Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.

The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist. It is a miracle. And the dance is a celebration of that miracle.

The body says what words cannot.

Censorship is the height of vanity.

The reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.

My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.

Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.

When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it’s the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.