There's no such thing as a perfect play. Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play.

Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that.

What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.

The power of the past to still dominate our thinking today.

However, the moral center of New York City, I believe, is the New York City Ballet.

Oh, I never use a seat belt. I don't believe in gravity.

You can't kind of take away, you either do or you don't. If you kind of take away something you're a failure.