Ballet Quotes

Dancing is a tough career, but I'm glad I spent it at the Royal Ballet.

I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do.

Acting is a sense of wonder and magic and mystery for me and when life takes me on a new journey, I simply remember the smile my first ballet recital put on my face and I move forward.

Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York.

Boxing is my real passion. I can go to ballet, theatre, movies, or other sporting events... and nothing is like the fights to me. I'm excited by the visual beauty of it. A boxer can look so spectacular by doing a good job.

I went away when I was 9 to a ballet school. I thought I wanted to be a dancer, but eight years of ballet cured me of that.

Ballet is completely unnatural to the body, just being turned-out... it's not the way your body is supposed to function, so you actually train your body to be a different structure than you were born with.

In swimming at my level it's about control of the small movements. A good ballet dancer floats across the stage, the best sprinters virtually abolish gravity. All motion occurs in the right direction.

At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life.

The moment the curtain rose on that first ballet, I knew something wonderful and new had come into my life. I can still see the first scene. The ballet was Divertimento No. 15.

I started with ballet and then my cousin Sarah introduced me to her tap teachers.

There might've been wires, but I have this ability to make myself light. Well you know what, in ballet, when you kind of lift yourself here, it's all up in the head.

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.

Dad worked in a warehouse when I was little and I didn't see him for three years as he was doing all the overtime God gave him to buy me new ballet shoes, or a new tutu.

I think of the New York City Ballet as the Yankees without George Steinbrenner.

There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence.

You can't drink on an eight hour flight, pass out, and then go onstage... well you can, but then you're Spandau Ballet.

I started taking ballet lessons when I was 4, and I was performing in ballet companies when I was 10, and I did summer stock in Miami Beach when I was 12, and finally I said, 'I gotta go to Broadway.'

Ballet is such a disciplined craft and it has given me a good grounding.

In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine.

Figure skating is an unlikely Olympic event but its good television. It's sort of a combination of gymnastics and ballet. A little sexy too which doesn't hurt.

Pilates is my favorite core strengthener. I do it three or four times a week. With all the strengthening and lengthening, it's like ballet. Plus, you get to do it lying down!

The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

If a ballet dancer falls over, it's knowing how to get out looking clumsy that counts.

The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.

My grandmother had a Miss Margaret's School of Dance to teach tap and ballet to kids, but I never studied it. I was raised a Mormon and they're dancing fools. It's the only vice they have - dancing.

You can imagine me as a kid growing up in redneck Texas with ballet shoes, tucking the violin under my arm. I had to fight my way up.

My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.