Patricia McBride Quotes

This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn't want to be tracked. It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable.

Learn it well in your head, know it well, pick things you know and bring the old you and all the experience you have from singing these various kinds of feelings that are still related to what I have done in the rest of my career.

You create a blueprint of your best performance, and you're happiest the night you surpass that blueprint. That won't happen that often, but it will happen. It's like sculpting: you keep refining. When you have a piece that is yours, that is just you, that becomes obsessive; you think about it all the time.

Dances have a second and third life. You feel they are never ready. They always have a chance for another life.

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.

You only get better by playing.

At age 10, I was better at ballet than I think I will ever be at any physical activity for the rest of my life.

Being a ballerina, you don't ever want to show yourself less than perfect, ever. That's what your goal is: 24/7 perfection.

The biggest challenge to me is always technique.

If you're any good at all at what you do, you get better the more you do it.

That's what distinguishes the pros from people involved in amateur theatre. You just go out and do it again and again.

When you look at Beyonce, every interview she does is just perfect delivery, perfect execution, and the thing is, she has honed that skill down.

I love playing music with people, but I also just love the art and meditation of being alone and working on stuff.

There is a fluency and an ease with which true mastery and expertise always expresses itself, whether it be in writing, whether it be in a mathematical proof, whether it be in a dance that you see on stage, really in every domain. But I think the question is, you know, where does that fluency and mastery come from?

One thing you notice is, there's a lot of people with raw talent, and then there's people who take that talent and work hard.

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.

I grew up studying ballet; I grew up honing my craft.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Diana Vishneva is not only a magnificent dancer but a magnificent actress - no one works harder or understands more.

You know who a role model for me is? George Ballanchine.

I am not an 'instant' actor... to really do anything, I've got to try it five or six or a dozen times.

We're just getting better at our trade, man. We know what we're doing, and the reason why is that we've spent 30 years doing it. There's nothing that can replace that.

Really, acting is like anything else. The more time you put in, the more you learn and the more you can give back to the industry.

I love working with Alicia Keys, because it's not just the ability to do the dance to me; I think it's the ability to interpret it that excites me the most.

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.