Fred Astaire Quotes

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

My method is much like choreography. I don't sit at a table. I work in a room with people.

I like to choreograph and create and design the costumes and do it all and then step back and watch it and then move on to the next project.

It's amazing what a resource modern technology is now for making ballets, and I film my rehearsals almost every day.

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

I'm proud when my dance numbers are spoken about for my expressions and steps.

I'm trying to create ballets that I would enjoy seeing.

I've always sort of marveled at our ability to chat and match, because of, I come, honestly I think of myself of as a little bit of hack, and think like that, and I think of her [Mia Michaels] as an artist.

I love composing and writing music and dancing and performing and conceptualizing creatively for visual mediums. I love to create.

Making dances is an act of progress; it is an act of growth, an act of music, an act of teaching, an act of celebration, an act of joy.

I think Balanchine and Robbins talk to God and when I call, he's out to lunch.

Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.

To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea.

The first time I started choreographing was in the dark, in my living room, with the lights completely out, to some popular music on the radio. I put the radio on full blast and I started moving. I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't want to see it... I had to start in the dark.

I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.

Dancing is being trusted with other people's guts; choreographing is trusting other people with yours. When I choreograph I'm giving a dancer something to do and trusting the dancer to do it and build on it.

Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it

If one had to define one essential gift with which a dancer needs to be endowed, there might be a rush of answers. A beautiful body, grace of line, graciousness of spirit, joy in the work, ability to please, unswerving integrity, relentless ambition towards some abstract perfection. Certainly all these factors determine a dancer's character, and every element exists in some combination within the performing artist's presence.

I think people face that in any artistic field, this idea of: oh, I could do that, if I had the time.

Songwriting and screenwriting aren't that different to me.

In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.

I can always paint very well with my eyes, but with my hands it doesn't always work out.

I used to try to write a song a day. I've been so busy lately.

Nobody tells people who are beginners - and I really wish somebody had told this to me - that all of us who do creative work... get into it because we have good taste.

Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.