Quotes on Dance

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.

I say over and over again that I am just standing on the shoulders of so many who have set this path for me, and they may not be seen or recognized or have been given an opportunity to have a voice, but I'm here representing all of those dancers. Dance Theatre of Harlem Virginia Johnson, Tai Jimenez, Lauren Anderson.

Learn to dance, so when you get to heaven the angels know what to do with you.

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too.

Will someone else's life be brighter tomorrow, because of what you have done today?

The good Lord gave you a body that can stand most anything. It's your mind you have to convince.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

Life is like an eternal dance. The movements of the dance are choreographed through your awareness.

If God is the DJ, then Life is the dance floor; Love is the rhythm and You are the music.

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.

I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

I believe it is in my nature to dance by virtue of the beat of my heart, the pulse of my blood and the music in my mind.

There are so many things and so many aspects to gay life that I've discovered and so many things to write about. I have a new life, and I have a new take on dance music because of that life.

The main thing, of course, always, is the fact that there is only one of you in the world, just one, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost. Ambition is not enough; necessity is everything.

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.

No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.

There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.

If your only dance experience is the Nutcracker, it will be a shock; hopefully shocking in a good way.

Some people seem to think that good dancers are born, but all the good dancers I have known are taught or trained.