When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can't simulate in a sedentary position.

Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.

The necessity to constantly turn in an excellent performance, to be absolutely wedded to this dedication and this ideal means that as a child you're going to pay for it personally.

It takes skill to bring something you've imagined into the world: to use words to create believable lives, to select the colors and textures of paint to represent a haystack at sunset, to combine ingredients to make a flavorful dish. No one is born with that skill. It is developed through exercise, through repitition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time. . . . If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

I have always felt one of the things dance should do - its business being so clearly physical - is challenge the culture's gender stereotypes.

It was not until I had graduated from college that I made a professional commitment to it. Frankly, I didn't think it wise. I was my own interior parental force, and it's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.

I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching.