Diaghilev was the first to notice good character dancers and that sort of thing.

Classical ballet will never die.

God gave us all exactly the same fingers, arms, legs, and feet, but in our different countries we divided them all a little differently as we feel it, do you understand?

You cannot create genius. All you can do is nurture it.

Hardly any generation wants to take the whole of the last generation, it just wants to take its best bits.

And then you have the classical ballerinas, they're like sopranos. Applied to the dance.

First of all, the most important, that is to learn everything good that has survived from other times, and carefully to watch the bad - and throw it out.

You never advance without losing something en passant... you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing.

Somebody must always be doing something new, or life would get very dull.

As time goes on, all schools only get left alive if they have found something special themselves.

Nothing is done easily, first have the thing, then the thing has a success, then all sorts of difficulties arise through the success.

We can achieve more in a moment of compassion than in an hour of anger.

The real strength of therose bush is not in the flowers but in the roots and the branches.

The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.

Plus, publishing's inherent conservatism, means that what little did get through was weighted towards the commercial end of the scale, which is not the kind of writing that excites me.

It's ginned up by the corporate plutocracy as a way of distracting the working-class people that it's screwing. We hamstring our own natural progressivism in this country, and that's really stupid.

I pretend something scary is in front of me.

Music is a safe type of high. It's more the way it was supposed to be. That's where highness came, I guess, from anyway. It's nothing but rhythm and motion.

We sell books, other people sell shoes. What's the difference? Publishing isn't the highest art.

Fourteen-year-old, why must you giggle and dote, Fourteen-year-old, why are you such a goat? I'm fourteen years old, that is the reason, I giggle and dote in season.