Quotes from Sylvie Guillem

When you do one more 'Cinderella' or whatever, what is there to learn? Every part in the repertoire has a good side and a bad side, and the more often you do the same ballet, the more often the bad side comes out. If you want to give dance life, you must give it fresh food, not keep going back to the garbage to look for old scraps.

When you improvise alone, you don't risk a lot, but doing an improvisation when you are two is even more difficult because you need to listen exactly to understand what is going to happen.

Dance should touch people.

I'm not a social animal, and I had a reputation that came before me of being very difficult, of screaming at everybody, so people tended to keep their distance.

My reputation precedes me all the time, but I'm not the monster people think I am.

As a child, I was afraid of everything. My parents were shy, the kind of people for whom it is an ordeal to go and buy some bread or whatever.

It is in my nature to be a little shy. It takes time for me to talk to people and trust them.

Animals feel pain and love and joy, just as humans. But in the industrialised meat, dairy, and egg industries, animals are denied everything that's natural and important to them. Some of them don't even feel the fresh air. They don't see the light.

Dancers are trained to be disciplined to do what they are told, but I knew that time goes by, and I didn't want to make the mistakes of the others.

I loved being at the Royal Ballet. Those choreographers, MacMillan and Ashton, they knew how to translate complicated life into choreography.

Dancing pleases me. I hope I transmit that to others.

When I was doing gymnastics, I was playing. It was fun. The ballet was not fun at all. Yes, I agree you must have discipline, but you don't need to be a witch. You can't teach a child like that. Three times a week, I went back to train as a gymnast. Then I was happy.

Fate is like a train. When it flies past, you can choose if you want to get on it or not, to say no or say yes.

The best times are when the time on stage becomes much slower and the movement much bigger - in that case, everything seems to flow. This state does not happen very often, but when it does, it is a magic kind of pleasure.

Ballet is hard enough when you go with it; when you have to force your body to do things, it is so much harder.

There are some ballets you can do for a long time. With others, you have to know when to stop. Some are very destructive. Forsythe's choreography pushes dancers to the extreme. That's why it's best to vary. That way, you break your body a little bit in different places, but not a lot in one place.

At school, either gymnastics or dance, it was the same. It gave me pleasure to move. And then, when I worked to achieve something new and out of the ordinary, it made me feel good. I felt I had surpassed myself.

I think the only regret I have is not to have opened my eyes sooner to aspects of life like the relationship of man with nature and animals.

My body is very nice to me. I have a lucky physique - I just don't take weight on.

I am only interested in being famous for my dancing. For me, the concept of the sacred monster is only about the stage - it is not about image.

For someone like me, who as a kid could not have two people in front of me without wanting to hide, to end up on stage with a lot of people in front of me, feeling good, it has to be a strange and special place.

I cannot stand unfairness.

Having limits to push against is how you find out what you can do.

There are things I cannot do, costumes I cannot wear. When I have taken stands on things, it is because I have thought carefully about them.