I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance.

Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for - for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.

In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.

I don't have a past. I have a continuous present. The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.

What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is.

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policeman don't have to look beautiful at the same time.

I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.

The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.

Dance is music made visible

Curiosity is the beginning of all creativity.

A law of life: at the precise instant when someone tells a truth, that truth is transformed into a story

In the times of barbaric wars

There's something rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet says...it's payback time!

If I had to think of what I would do different in my whole career, it's that I never would have picked up a beer, bottle of vodka. That definitely changed my life. That is an Achilles' heel for me.

It's easy to convince men to love you, Puck. All you have to do is be a mountain they have to climb or a poem they don't understand.

I want to leave the world a better place for horses and people.

We have no salaries. When one says he is from a good Catholic family and says he wants to help us, why should we refuse his offer?

If you don't like what you see, stop looking.

Nobody who looks as though he enjoyed life is ever called distinguished, though he is a man in a million.