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

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" I do not watch television, never have. "

" I always find that the best collaborations are when you work with people that know what they're doing, and you leave them alone to do it. "

" There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism. "

" The necessity to constantly turn in an excellent performance, to be absolutely wedded to this dedication and this ideal means that as a child you're going to pay for it personally. "

" 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. "

" If a thing moves, it lives. "

" We don't need to illustrate music; music illustrates itself. "

" I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place. "

" What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement. "

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

" Broadway has some very tight expectations as to what a show is. "

" Desire is the first thing a modern dancer should have. Skill can be developed. But if you don't have desire as a modern dancer, forget it. "

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

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

" 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. "

" It was not until I had graduated from college that I made a professional commitment to it. Frankly, I didn't think it wise. I was my own interior parental force, and it's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer. "

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

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

" Kids should be encouraged to compete. "

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

" Counterpoint is a component that gives real energy, and it is about optimism. "

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

" Who a dancer is physically feeds into character for me. Always has. "

" I think people want very much to simplify their lives enough so that they can control the things that make it possible to sleep at night. "

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

" I've always felt compelled to explore range, because, as far as I know, we're only here once. So let's see how much we can encompass. "

" Nothing is more terrifying to me, really, than the status quo. I'll make mistakes before I keep doing something the same way. "

" Work is work; wherever I'm working, I do the best I can. If the actual dollars come from investors as opposed to taxpayers and patrons, what's the difference? "

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

" 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. "