Human beings are born with the instinct to express themselves through movement. Even before he could communicate with words, primitive man was dancing to the beat of his own heart.
The energy doesn't end at the hands. I want such intensity that it feels like light is streaming from every finger.
Don't dance for the audience; dance for yourself.
The time to sing is when your emotional level is just too high to speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel.
Dance expresses joy better than anything else.
I am not an educated person. I didn't come up through a ballet company. I came up through burlesque. So I have a lot of inferiority feelings concerning my own lack of education, my entry into show business. I'm not a Baryshnikov. I'm not a Nureyev. I came up in vaudeville. Strippers. So I've always had these feelings. But I think they've also helped me.
Choreography is writing on your feet.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, don't take it serious, its mysterious. Life is just a bowl of cherries, so live and laugh and laugh at love, love a laugh, laugh and love.
They may not know what I'm doing, but they know I'm doing something!
In today's world, everything seems like some sort of long audition.
I thank God that I wasn't born perfect.
I like attractive people who aren't so terribly aware that they are attractive... people who aren't afraid to roll on the floor and make fools out of themselves.
I think Balanchine and Robbins talk to God and when I call, he's out to lunch.
You spend your whole life trying to get known and then you spend the rest of it hiding in the toilet.
She not only kept her lovely figure, she's added so much to it.
Directors are never in short supply of girlfriends.
Mary Martin was Broadway's biggest closet king. Everyone thought Ethel (Merman) was butch and maybe a lesbian, but she wasn't. And everyone thought that lovely little Mary was Miss Femme, and she was -- except next to her gay husband. In other words, don't judge a star by her cover.
