Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a grazer by nature - fruit, nuts - but I try to discipline myself and sit down for regular meals when the girls are around, as I want to instil good habits in them.
I had a wonderful childhood, coming from Cincinnati, and I think that it was great going into the life that I was going to have, where you have to start young as a dancer.
The world of dance is a natural world from which civilization has divorced many of us by making it appear remote - something reserved for the few who have a special talent.
When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.
I set as my goal to be the best dancer I could be. Not the most famous, or the highest paid dancer, just the best I could be. Out of this discipline came great freedom and calm.
I think perhaps I've learned to be myself. I have a theory that all artists who would be important - painters and writers - must learn to be themselves. It takes a very long time.
Technical things are getting more mechanical. Take 'Swan Lake,' the Black Swan pas de deux. Now, my goodness, they're turning not just 32 fouettes - but double or triple pirouettes.
You have to be able to cut off from the ballet and relax, or you have anxiety dreams at night, worrying about what you're going to dance the next day, going over every little detail.
Dancers are working their bodies just like a marathon runner would, and you have to eat to make it through a three-hour performance. Dancers put their bodies through incredible strain.
Eating a healthy diet is not just about eating a few special foods. There's a bigger picture. You need to practice moderation, eat a variety of foods, and get enough physical activity.
The orthopaedic surgeon said that if ever I had hip or groin pain, I should rest until the pain went. However, resting is not part of a dancer's life - so I just danced through the pain.
On the other hand, I think it is wonderful for everyone to take ballet classes, at any age. It gives you a discipline, it gives you a place to go. It gives you some control in your life.
The essential thing about mothers is that one needs to know that they are there, particularly at that age when, paradoxically, one is trying so hard to break away from parental influence.
It's ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven't lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else.
As soon as you become afraid to make a fool of yourself, you're in trouble. I decided I may as well just see if I can live with myself making millions of mistakes and learn something from it.
To follow without halt, one aim; there is the secret of success. And success? What is it? I do not find it in the applause of the theater; it lies rather in the satisfaction of accomplishment.
It is a temptation to exploit one's technique because an audience is easily reached this way, but they cannot be moved by technique alone and to move an audience is the role of dance as an art.
I know my body. What happened is that I got so caught up in the applause I forgot how I should dance. All my life I've been what others wanted - in dancing and in life. Now I'm doing it my way.
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.
Ballet requires movements which are very unnatural. With every step, you do a circular movement of the hip. You turn out from the hip and make your knees point out to the side instead of forward.
I do feel blessed to have small ears - I've never felt self-conscious when my hair is swept back. My feet are a different story - I grew up being painfully aware of them because they are so long.
I joined the Royal Ballet School when I was 13. Before then, I'd done ballet twice a week after school. The rest of my class had started aged 11, so I'd missed two years and was really far behind.
I loved the stage not because it provided an escape from myself or my humdrum life but because when the curtain went up I could be whoever I wanted to be, and that was true freedom - to be myself.
That the work involved, the willingness to take chances, the commitment, the opportunity to get on stage and make people happy, was more important than becoming famous, or even what I was dancing.
I am different because I have better schooling, better understanding of the line, gesture, how feet working, positions. They taught me modern things... and I wanted to give what I had: my schooling.
When you are on stage in front of an audience, you want to engage the entire crowd. If a thousand people are in the theater, you need to dance a thousand different ways, not one-thousandth of a way.
I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do.
Ever since I've given up dancing, every physiotherapist or Pilates teacher has said you have to keep moving. If I don't, I'll have a hundred times more injuries because you get weak areas on your body.
Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are, I don't quite know how I'm going to do them, because I haven't lived that moment yet. I always feel very insecure and I get very excited.
When I was a teenager, I used to watch the 'Making Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'' video and try to follow the steps and do the 'Thriller' moves in my bedroom. That was the most incredible dance sequence.
Dancing is my gift and my life... God gave me this gift to bring delight to others. I am haunted by the need to dance. It is the purest expression of every emotion, earthly and spiritual. It is happiness.
Classical ballet is very extreme. You're doing it six days a week, and it's a kind of obsession of perfecting a move. So every muscle in your body has been stretched and tightened, stretched and tightened.
You don't learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don't really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time.
I think especially in a world where you have so little say about what goes on in your life, or in the politics of the world around you, it is wonderful to go into that studio, and tell yourself what to do.
When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.
When I started, there was a very strong image of what the ballerina was supposed to be in her tights and her costume, and then I started doing photo shoots in bomber boots, and it wasn't seen as the done thing.
I've always been quite conscious of it, though I don't know why. I would never overspend, and I have to know exactly what I've got so that I avoid going into overdraft. I watch my pennies, and I'm quite thrifty.
The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.
Now I'm on television, I'm far more conscious of my skin than I used to be - I would often leave the theatre with layers of pancake make-up still on my face, but on a medium such as TV, I have to be more fastidious.
It is entertainment; we mustn't forget that. Dance is entertainment. You can have the best technicians in the world, but they'll be boring to watch. It has to be about entertainment as well, but it's quality, grace.
Ballet is a healthy world despite what people might think. There's a perception that ballet dancers are skinny and unhealthy, but that's rubbish. You have to be strong, so eating regularly and healthily is essential.
It is by the steady elimination of everything which is ugly - thoughts and words no less than tangible objects - and by the substitution of things of true and lasting beauty that the whole progress of humanity proceeds.
I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.
Our pointe shoes are our instruments. If something's wrong with my feet, all my mind goes there. I usually have six pairs ready. Soft shoes for one act, stiffer shoes for another, stronger shoes for a variation with a lot of turns.
I was incredibly supple and did gymnastics as well. So half of my injuries are because I am over-supple and the joints could always go that little bit further. But I was happy to push, and I have no regrets. That is important to say.
Often, when you've reached a very high level of achievement, you almost become paralyzed by the idea that anything you might do might be imperfect. Perfection is just the striving, the effort, the struggle, but it's hard to remember that.
Dancers are a great breed of people. And they really want to dance so you don't have to beg them to work. However, dancers sometimes build walls around themselves because they are presenting themselves all the time: dancing is very much a confession.
I know, for me, dance did inspire me. Not just in how I feel but that confidence of being able to hold myself and come into a room and just feel comfortable with my body and how I stand and how you present yourself and just how you wear clothes, even.
There is no way anything of value can be done without some framework. It might well be that the framework is discarded or the rules opposed; that is not important. What is essential is that they exist so that one knows when one is in opposition to them.
Dancers, many dancers today can do so much technically. You can give them steps that are complicated, then more complicated, pyrotechnical - and they can execute these steps to perfection. But to do simple steps with a pure classical line, that is truly difficult.