Martha Graham Quotes

Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.

I was always interested in choreography - in making people think and feel something.

Dance should touch people.

The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

The New York City Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that.

The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.

I've got a three-year-old daughter. To picture her being a dancer, I'd absolutely love that. I'm in absolute awe of what they do. Just seeing them work, they're incredible.

You have to connect with a song, and when you write it, that connection is already there. It's your baby; your passion is in that song.

I don't think music teaches about mundane, everyday life. It teaches us what it is to be a human being.

I've always been a dancer, and I will always be a dancer.

Dancing is the personification of music, and music is an abstract expression of the human spirit. But still it's the act of communication, of making one feel. Otherwise it would just be gymnastics.

The world of dance is where I felt accepted as a human being.

Performers love to perform - that's the thing that we do. I think one of the best things was being able to imagine anything that I wanted, anything that I came up with we could do, because this theater is unbelievable.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

Ice Cube is the piece of me that I give away to the public.

Singing is what got me into everything and made me fall in love with this industry.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.

Dance has always been my number one. I started when I was seven years old and I've had the opportunity to work with some really amazing artists.

Kleiber was the perfect dancer - so perfect that you could see the process. After all, dance is a process; it's a series of snapshots. Kleiber knew how to connect people to the flow, so he could stop managing people.

Music is not simply an orchestration of something, but it's also not something as trivial as honesty.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

I always wanted to devote a certain part of my life to dance - my true being is to be a dancer.

I want to create. I think that's the one word I can grow on.

We must be able to inspire. That's my goal in acting.