Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.

A dancer must listen to his body and pay homage to it. Behind the movement lies this terrible, driving passion, this necessity. I won't settle for anything less.

All things I do are in every woman. Every woman is Medea. Every woman is Jocasta. There comes a time when a woman is a mother to her husband. Clytemnestra is every woman when she kills.

We are all of us, unique - each a unique pattern of creativity and if we do not fulfill it, it is lost for all time.

Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place.

At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!

I don't try to tell the dancers exactly what a dance means before they do it.