Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.
Choreography is simpler than you think. Just go and do, and don’t think so much about it. Just make something interesting.
I cannot move, I cannot even want to move, unless I hear the music first.
Dance is music made visible.
See the music, hear the dance.
The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.
It’s like the time capsule with everything in it. Or like the seed that when you plant it, becomes the enormous tree with leaves and fruit. Everybody was in that little seed, and so everything can open. The tree of dance is like that. It just takes a long, long time to blossom.
I’ve got more energy now than when I was younger because I know exactly what I want to do.
What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is.
Ballet is important and significant – yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.
I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating. If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?
Ballet will speak for itself. About itself.
They are poets of gesture.
I am a cloud – in trousers.
The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant’s trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.
My muse must come to me on union time.
The woman’s function is to fascinate men.
I can always invent movement, and sometimes it can be fitted into the right place, but that is not choreography. It is the music that dictates the whole shape of the work. I do not believe in the permanence of anything in ballet save the purely classical.
Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.
I have no literary approach – except to literature.