Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I've always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work - the rest is style. "

Related Quotes:

" Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that. "

" Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background. "

" When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art. "

" Things change all the time, so why do people make such a philosophical to-do that things are constantly in transition? "

" I used to say to myself, 'Well, in the old days everybody danced because they loved to dance, and there was none of this professional garbage going on about how much can you get for this or that or the other, or any of the kinds of things that insecurity can sometimes promote. Sometimes it's for the wrong reasons.' "

" I'm obviously always interested in the dancer who's an athlete and vice versa. I expect dancers to be in condition like an athlete is and to challenge themselves in the same way, to the same physical degree. "

" Kids should be encouraged to compete. "

" I don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity. "

" I look for dancers who have all the technique in the world. But they must be dancers who are open-minded, who are willing to forget that they know anything. They also have to be gorgeous; they must have a clear image of themselves and strong personalities. "

" 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. "

" To survive, you've got to keep wheedling your way. You can't just sit there and fight against odds when it's not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel - and find a way to keep moving. "

" Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere. "

" I do not watch television, never have. "

" I realize that dancers have worked long and hard for standards. However, on occasion, I think that it's good to examine one's heart and ask why are we dancing. "

" I thought I had to make an impact on history. I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission. Posterity deals with us however it sees fit. But I gave it 20 years of my best shot. "

" A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things. "

" I don't hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don't read a lot of literature and not care about language. "

" People often say to me, 'I don't know anything about dance.' I say, 'Stop. You got up this morning, and you're walking. You are an expert.' "

" No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they'll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them. "

" Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut. "

" Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language. "

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

" When I started making dances in the '60s, narrative dance was sort of off the radar screen. What was important at the time in the avant-garde was minimalism. "

" The ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language. "

" There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn't lie, which words easily can 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

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