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

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

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.

I believe one thing: that today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and you can’t stop.

I believe that we learn by practice… it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

If you feel depressed you shouldn’t go out on the street because it will show on your face and you’ll give it to others. Misery is a communicable disease.

The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.

I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.

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

Dancers are the messengers of the gods.

We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.

I get up, I fall down, all the while I am dancing.

I am certain that movement never lies. There is only one law of posture I have been able to discover – the perpendicular line connecting heaven and earth.

Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.

The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.