GENE KELLY

I didn't want to be a dancer. I just did it to work my way through college. But I was always an athlete and gymnast, so it came naturally.

When Ginger Rogers danced with Astaire, it was the only time in the movies when you looked at the man, not the woman.

I arrived in Hollywood twenty pounds overweight and as strong as an ox.

At 14 I discovered girls. At that time dancing was the only way you could put your arm around the girl. Dancing was courtship.

I still find it almost impossible to relax for more than one day at a time.

My mother had gotten a job as a receptionist at a dancing school and had the idea that we should open our own dancing school; we did, and it prospered.

I think dancing is a man's game and if he does it well he does it better than a woman.

There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy.

I'll never starve.

I'd studied dance in Chicago every summer end taught it all winter, and I was well-rounded. I wasn't worried about getting a job on Broadway. In fact, I got one the first week.

Things danced on the screen do not look the way they do on the stage. On the stage, dancing is three-dimensional, but a motion picture is two-dimensional.

I wanted to do new things with dance, adapt it to the motion picture medium.

I got started dancing because I knew it was one way to meet girls.

The only thing is that ordinarily when I do dance with [women] they think I am suddenly going to throw them over a table or twist them all around. All I want to do is one-two, one-two-three - a simple fox trot. But they're shaking with anticipation at the thought that I'm about to whip them around and then toss them on the roof.

I didn't want to move or act like a rich man. I wanted to dance in a pair of jeans. I wanted to dance like the man in the streets.

You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams. And I know if I can make you smile by jumping over a couple of couches or running through a rainstorm, then I'll be very glad to be a song and dance man.

There is a certain amount of pornography that exists throughout Purple Rain, but the appeal is obvious. You can really pick that picture apart and see where "A" fits into "B" and so on. It was very wisely done.

I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov do Twyla Tharp's Sinatra Suite on PBS. I have no numbers to prove it, but I bet that kids who saw that loved it. I think you will see younger dancers, who certainly have the artistic sense and capabilities, start going back to romantic numbers.

America now has more and better dancers than they have ever had in the history of the country, but that won't account for the public wants to see.

Like an athlete, [dance] is an everyday job. You have to stay in shape - unless you just want to loaf through a couple of hoofing routines. But that just didn't satisfy me.

I don't understand the whole concept of doubles. They used to do that in the early sound films in Hollywood, but I thought we had gotten rid of that. Now not only do you have doubles, but as in Flashdance, you have triples, quadruples. From my point of view it is bad for the art.

I miss the romance. I keep saying this over and over again, but dance follows music. And if the accent today is percussion and rhythm and loudness, then that is the way the dance numbers will be. But it is pretty hard on romance with seven guitars, three drums, and no melody instruments in the band.

I had been asked to open a nightclub in Atlantic City. They offered me a ridiculous amount of money. They literally overpaid me. So I did one show a night. Then they asked me back by popular demand. So I went back. Then I said, "To hell with this." I was only doing it for the money, and I was doing easy routines. It's just too much work to get up every day and practice.

In the 1930s there was this tendency in Hollywood to portray everyone as rich. Even if they were doing a poor man's dance, they were all so nicely clothed, gowned, coiffured. That's why I decided to wear white socks, loafers, T-shirts, and blue jeans. I had a sociopolitical context in front of me: I was a child of the Depression who danced in a way that would represent the common man.

There's nothing revolutionary about Saturday Night Fever . You can see the same kind of movement at your local disco.