My muse must come to me on union time.

I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating. If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?

God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it - from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do.

It's like the time capsule with everything in it. Or like the seed that when you plant it, becomes the enormous tree with leaves and fruit. Everybody was in that little seed, and so everything can open. The tree of dance is like that. It just takes a long, long time to blossom.

If you don't feel challenged, it's because you're not doing enough. Ballet should never feel comfortable. Comfortable is lazy! If you're comfortable when you dance, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. 100 % is not enough. You have to give 200%. One tendu takes years of hard work and will never be perfect. Everything in ballet is a challenge.

I can always invent movement, and sometimes it can be fitted into the right place, but that is not choreography. It is the music that dictates the whole shape of the work. I do not believe in the permanence of anything in ballet save the purely classical.

I've got more energy now than when I was younger because I know exactly what I want to do.