I arrived in Hollywood twenty pounds overweight and as strong as an ox. But if I put on a white tails and tux like Fred Astaire, I still looked like a truck driver.

You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams.

I didn't want to move or act like a rich man. I wanted to dance in a pair of jeans. I wanted to dance like the man in the streets.

I got started dancing because I knew it was one way to meet girls.

Any man who looks like a sissy while dancing is just a lousy dancer.

If Fred Astaire is the Cary Grant of dance, I'm the Marlon Brando.

My mother had gotten a job as a receptionist at a dancing school and had the idea that we should open our own dancing school; we did, and it prospered.

Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat.

When Ginger Rogers danced with Astaire, it was the only time in the movies when you looked at the man, not the woman.

The way I look at a musical, you are commenting on the human condition no matter what you do. A musical may be light and frivolous, but by its very nature, it makes some kind of social comment.

I took it as it came and it happened to be very nice.

The heights to which we aspire - often prove not as lofty as those that transpire.

There are still a few of us booklovers around despite the awful warnings of Marshall McLuhan with his TV era and his pending farewell to Gutenberg.

A people can prosper under a very bad government and suffer under a very good one, if in the first case the local administration is effective and in the second it is inefficient.

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

Hard pounding, gentlemen. Let's see who pounds the longest.

I think it's essential to make new music now, and to try and make epic records now, and not rely on what happened in the past.

Everything ultimately comes down to trust.

Ambition without contribution is of no significance.

There was an ape in the days that were earlier, Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more gave a thumb to his wrist — Then he was a Man and a Positivist.

A man likes to feel that he is loved, a woman likes to be told.