What brought me to the theater, no matter you're a Jew or a Russian or Armenian or Latvian, are suddenly illuminated by stage light and one beautiful image of dance.

I don't go to a gym, I don't do yoga. I don't do personal training.

When a body moves, it's the most revealing thing. Dance for me a minute, and I'll tell you who you are.

I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.

Be. Good. To yourself, to other people, to everything you do. It's a norm of life by which people should try to live. Don't waste time. Be interesting and interested.

The more injuries you get, the smarter you get.

I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.

No one is born a dancer. You have to want it more than anything.

No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.

When I see people on the street, I look at how they walk. It's like a signature, a fingerprint.

There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

When good things are on the horizon you keep walking towards the sun.

A child is a child.

You've got the holy trinity of what a girl wants, she said. Cute, smart, funny. I don't think you realize that.

I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns, as Johnson did, when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit

If someone's trying to intimidate me, male or female, I don't respect them enough to be intimidated.

The Irish didn't read and write for a couple of thousand years, and I think we developed good memories and recall. We have a sense of the revelatory detail. I look for them.

To eat is human, to digest, divine

So what it boils down to, in my humble opinion, is that we need to support the arts in schools, and at every other level in the education of children.

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.