Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.

Sometimes it's blood memory... not the blood your mother and father gave you... but that which stretches back two or three thousand years.

In 1980, a well-meaning fundraiser came to see me and said, "Miss Graham, the most powerful thing you have going for you to raise money is your respectability." I wanted to spit. Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable.

You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels - a leaf feels, a storm feels - what right have you to do that? You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech.

Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.

I want to make people feel intensely alive. I'd rather have them against me than indifferent.