Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

They are poets of gesture.

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.

The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.

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

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

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.