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" Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism. "

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" After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Balzac loved courtesans. They were independent women, and in the 19th century, that was a breed that was just evolving. "

" 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.' "

" In those days, male dancers were a rarer breed than women. as they are still today, A good male dancer, one as strong as we were, was very difficult to come by if you couldn't afford to pay them. "

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

" I'm not interested in seeing dance die. It's not to my advantage. Nor is it to our culture's advantage or anybody else's. "

" There is a moral dimension, for me, in anything that's any good. "

" Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me. "

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

" I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I'm not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to. "

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

" 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. "

" I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I do not watch television, never have. "

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

" I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women. "

" '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 thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts. "

" 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. "

" In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything. "

" These days, I think we could all agree that having a just-friend is not a bad thing. "

" The content and thematic materials of dance is, of itself, like boxing. You play tennis and baseball. But boxing is not a sport you play: you stand up and do it. "

" If you're speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty - and perhaps it's best approached as the art of constant maintenance. "

" I had always seen myself as a star; I wanted to be a galaxy. "

" If I didn't believe in myself as a dancer, I wouldn't choreograph. "

" I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention. "