George Balanchine Quotes - Page 2

They are poets of gesture.

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

The woman's function is to fascinate men.

I can always invent movement, and sometimes it can be fitted into the right place, but that is not choreography. It is the music that dictates the whole shape of the work. I do not believe in the permanence of anything in ballet save the purely classical.

Ballet will speak for itself. About itself.

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell. We can't dance synonyms.

I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating. If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?

The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.

I am a cloud - in trousers.

The choreographer and the dancer must remember
that they reach the audience through the eye.
It's the illusion created which convinces the audience,
much as it is with the work of a magician.

Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.

One is born to be a great dancer.

My muse must come to me on union time.

I have no literary approach - except to literature.