America now has more and better dancers than they have ever had in the history of the country, but that won't account for the public wants to see.

I wanted to do new things with dance, adapt it to the motion picture medium.

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

I still find it almost impossible to relax for more than one day at a time.

I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.

There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy.

At the time the quickest way to establish yourself as an American was to throw a little bit of tap into your dance - even when it wasn't called for. But what also helped me was the fact that I was dancing in roles that I had played.