Living had little use for me other than how it could be funneled into dance.

I had always seen myself as a star; I wanted to be a galaxy.

There are so few people who can really take hold of art and sort of eat and chew it up. Somehow it's got to be held special, sacred in a corner, and if you don't do the same thing with it, if you're not equally reverential, serious, and pompous about it, well, then you're not a great artist. Who needs that?

By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.

Men and women are very different athletes, and frankly, I didn't want to deal with the male potential.

when the time came I would do battle with my mother for the right to sit at the center of my own life.

Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.