The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one`s work seriously and taking one`s self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.
Margot Fonteyn
On her breakup with Valentino: "With butlers, maids and the rest, what work is there for a housewife? I won`t be a parasite. I won`t sit home and twiddle my fingers, waiting for a husband who goes on the lot at five a.m. and gets home at midnight and rece...
Natacha Rambova
That somebody has the vision to put a few steps together and make a dance out of it, there is already a certain power implanted. My job is much easier - it`s just to put a light in it. - The Daily Telegraph, 09/02/2004
Mikhail Baryshnikov
No matter what I try to do or explore, my Kirov training, my expertise, and my background call me to return to dancing after all, because that`s my real vocation, and I have to serve it.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
[on the late Fred Astaire] "No dancer can watch him and not know that all the rest of us should be in a different business. Astaire is remote. It`s as if he were in an incubator, breathing his own air. His perfection is like crystal: you can see through i...
Mikhail Baryshnikov
Even now I feel furious with myself because whenever there`s a camera pointed towards me my MGM training makes me smile. I don`t like it. You can see it on all the people who came from that era because there was no question of them not smiling for the cam...
Leslie Caron
Oh, that`s nonsense. Sex symbol? A cup of tea will do it. Sex is overrated. Absolutely. Forget about it. A good golf game, a nice conversation with friends, will do better. - On what it is like to be an international sex symbol.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
There comes a moment in a young artist`s life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something out.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
On wondering why she survived the end of her stage career better than her sisters: "I reached the age of 32 and I took a good look at myself and said `What`s going on here? This is nothing. This is not life.` I went back to church and began to study and f...
Doris Eaton
The artist is the only lover, he alone has the pure vision of beauty, and love is the vision of the soul when it is permitted to gaze upon immortal beauty.
Isadora Duncan
I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people`s participation and young faces in the ...
Mikhail Baryshnikov
You have to fit their interests and how they participate. The worst thing you can do is take an open person and say they`re not part of this community if they don`t do this one act.
Sharon Lee