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" I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories. Either something works, or it doesn't. "

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" A dancer's life is all about repetition. "

" I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren. "

" I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do. "

" In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there's not the desperate urgency of when you're on a clock. "

" I'm not satisfied sitting in just the world of abstract work. "

" 'Bum's Rush' is a piece about timing, and everything that's in the piece needs to be with the piece. If people are missing, or marking, or unable to use their voices, the impulses that prompt the action are lost, and its logic crumbles. "

" Schubert had arguably the same melodic gift as Mozart, but even less support. He didn't have the early exposure, never got to travel anywhere, and yet generated and amassed a body of work that grew and developed and is very profound. "

" If a thing moves, it lives. "

" This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age. "

" When I look at the people who are the guiding figures in modern dance, I think, 'This does not look to me like the way I want to spend my days.' "

" What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about. "

" My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer. "

" I don't judge. Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business. "

" Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology. His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests. "

" It's always a problem, getting the curtain in at the end of the first act; having enough of a resolve so that you can bring the curtain in and then opening the show a second time is a little bizarre as a tradition. I've always preferred to go straight through. "

" I often say that in making dances I can make a world where I think things are done morally, done democratically, done honestly. "

" It's very important to work myself physically as hard as I can. "

" Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart. "

" At the ballet classes I took when I first came to New York, I would see great dancers like Cynthia Gregory and Lupe Serrano. I would look at them and study what they could do, and what I couldn't do. And then I'd think maybe they should try what I could do. "

" I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action. "

" You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical. "

" The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing. "

" The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body. "

" I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines. "

" Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing. "

" 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. "

" I always tell students that you've got to be practical. You do not need a dream. You need a purpose, something you can wake up to in the morning when the dream is dissipated. "

" I do at least 75 push-ups a day. "

" You either entertain an audience or you don't. "