At the time I started in ballet they were dancing ‘The Spirit of Champagne’ on pointe, in Paris. I thought, ‘I don’t want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!
Dancers have more bones than most people and on the days when you work hard you are sure that you have somehow accumulated more bones than you started with.
I get up, I fall down, all the while I am dancing.
You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels – a leaf feels, a storm feels – what right have you to do that? You have to have speech, and it’s a cultivated speech.
Discipline is liberation.
What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.
Repetition not for monotony but the ecstasy it induces.
In 1980, a well-meaning fundraiser came to see me and said, “Miss Graham, the most powerful thing you have going for you to raise money is your respectability.” I wanted to spit. Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable.
It’s not my job to look beautiful. It’s my job to look interesting.
Pity is a corroding thing.
All things I do are in every woman. Every woman is Medea. Every woman is Jocasta. There comes a time when a woman is a mother to her husband. Clytemnestra is every woman when she kills.
The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body. I don’t leap and jump anymore. I look at young dancers, and I am envious, more aware of what glories the body contains. But sensitivity is not made dull by age.
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.
Some of you are doomed to be artists.
I’d rather an audience like me than dislike me, but I’d rather they disliked me than be apathetic, because that is the kiss of death.
What I do must be done in the sunlight of awareness.
If I can’t dance, I don’t care if my dances are ever done again!
There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep.
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.
I want to make people feel intensely alive. I’d rather have them against me than indifferent.
Nobody cares if you can’t dance well.