To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity.
Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence.
You’re only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft.
I have not wanted to intimidate audiences. I have not wanted my dancing to be an elitist form. That doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted it to be excellent.
The more you fail in private, the less you will fail in public.
Failing, and learning from it, is necessary. Unil you’ve done it, you’re missing an important piece of your creative arsenal.
A young person has to start making decisions for themselves at a much earlier age than an overbearing parent allows one.
As people who have commitments and obligations, we try to blockade emotions and go on our course towards excellence, and that’s a lie. I’ve definitely paid a price. Everything is an exchange.
I don’t mean this, but I’m going to say it anyway. I don’t really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart.
In terms of individuals who actually inspired me, very few of the academic people that I had access to had that power over me. Maybe it’s simply because I wasn’t that committed to geometry.
Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it’s one place you can process them.
Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.
Creativity requires quite a lot of faith – not just in yourself but also in the knowledge that you have the right to proceed, even when you may not know exactly what you’re doing.
Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.
But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working.
In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there’s not the desperate urgency of when you’re on a clock.
Our guys have a vision of something bigger.
We’re a machine and we have to be worked in the same way we have to be fed.
This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider. You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.