Savion Glover Quotes

The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art.

I can understand when people copy people of the past and make the future their own.

Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

It's weird when you see pieces of choreography that were done for you 15 or 20 years ago and now they are being done by another dance company.

In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man - Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can't help it. Even if they don't believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible.

I think it's one thing to be able to dance, and it's another thing to learn all the wonderful moments of dance because in my day... it was the moving of dance.

You can see things growing up, be inspired by things. Just because they're not around anymore doesn't mean that you can't take those inspirations and bring them to life and bring them to the next generation.

One kind of artist is always striving to annihilate the past, to make the world anew in each new work, and so to triumph over the dead weight of routine. I am the other kind... who only sees his way forward by standing on the shoulders of those who have already cleared the path ahead.

Everything we've ever done has been for artistry's sake, and for the greater good and paying homage to those who came before us and paving the way for those who come after us.

Nothing I'm doing is without its predecessors.

I was very happy with the success of 'Noise/Funk,' but of course, there is a lot more that I have to say about the dance, about the history, about the people involved with the dance and their history.

I want to see movies that explore different forms and new styles of dance, and also those that revive the old.

The past is always recycled. I'm just taking what the people I looked up to did and translating it for my generation.

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

Tradition lives because young people come along who catch its romance and add new glories to it.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.

If you are intimidated by the artists who came before you, understand you too have a place, right next to them.

The genius is the man who has genuine and deep human relations with others, who does not cut himself off in the search for originality, but who realizes the value of artistic tradition.

A lot of stuff I do, 10 years later it becomes popular.

Actually I'm more passionate about dancing than I am about singing.

All those things that are now field to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

Folks wanna be like Will I Am not Bill I Am. They wanna be like Stevie Wonder not Steve Jobs.

Originality is going back to origins.