It is a fact that all the ballet's fundamental dance steps are derived from the folk dances of Western Europe.

Classical ballet will never die.

God gave us all exactly the same fingers, arms, legs, and feet, but in our different countries we divided them all a little differently as we feel it, do you understand?

You cannot create genius. All you can do is nurture it.

Hardly any generation wants to take the whole of the last generation, it just wants to take its best bits.

And then you have the classical ballerinas, they're like sopranos. Applied to the dance.

First of all, the most important, that is to learn everything good that has survived from other times, and carefully to watch the bad - and throw it out.

You never advance without losing something en passant... you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing.

Somebody must always be doing something new, or life would get very dull.

As time goes on, all schools only get left alive if they have found something special themselves.

Nothing is done easily, first have the thing, then the thing has a success, then all sorts of difficulties arise through the success.

Don't be afraid! Hold my hand and let's jump off that cliff together.

If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of someone else.

I've been melted into something too easy to spill. I make more and more of myself in order to make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehow he's made more of me, too.

The AP has only so many reporters, and CNN only has so many cameras, but we've got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access.

The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.

How do you prevent a little sociopath from becoming a big, full-blown sociopath? Sit on him.

If I was to model after someone's career, I would want to model after Justin Timberlake's career.

Let us remember the past with gratitude, live the present with enthusiasm, and look forward to the future with confidence.

In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.

I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.