As people who have commitments and obligations, we try to blockade emotions and go on our course towards excellence, and that's a lie. I've definitely paid a price. Everything is an exchange.

In terms of individuals who actually inspired me, very few of the academic people that I had access to had that power over me. Maybe it's simply because I wasn't that committed to geometry.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.

It's vital to establish some rituals-automatic but decisive patterns of behavior-at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way.

I think of music as fuel, its spectrum of energy governed by tempi, volume, and heart.

I never studied with Balanchine, but his work was very important to me.

Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you'll learn to do it better.