In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.

Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for - for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.

I don't have a past. I have a continuous present. The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.

What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is.

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policeman don't have to look beautiful at the same time.

I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.

The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.

Dance is music made visible

Storyless is not abstract. Two dancers on the stage are enough material for a story; for me, they are already a story in themselves

Sacrifices made for love are fine, unless the sacrifice is you.

Be careful when you ask Karma for something that you have always wanted. When I was young, I asked to be surrounded by beautiful women. Now I have a wife and four daughters.

The more you have seen, the larger your cognitive map, the more you can imagine.

...it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose. -Wilbur Wright, 1911

How often do I lull my seething blood to rest, for you have never seen anything so unsteady, so uncertain, as this heart.

Dare! - this word contains all the politics of our revolution.

To be moral involves taking a position towards that matrix, thinking critically about what is taken for granted.

We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions — perhaps so that we could believe in them.

You should help a man to take up a burden, but you should not help him put it back down.

Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it ... the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.