Quotes from George Balanchine

I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.

Choreography is simpler than you think. Just go and do, and don't think so much about it. Just make something interesting.

Dance is music made visible

Music must be seen, and dance must be heard

See the music, hear the dance.

I cannot move, I cannot even want to move, unless I hear the music first.

God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it - from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do.

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.

One is born to be a great dancer.

Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.

The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.

Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for - for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.

I don't have a past. I have a continuous present. The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.

My muse must come to me on union time.

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell... we can't dance synonyms.

I've got more energy now than when I was younger because I know exactly what I want to do.

Everything cannot be conveyed by ballet, only those things which can be shown on the stage.

There are no mothers-in-law in ballet.

My muse must come to me on union time.

The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.

God creates; I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it--from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others can do.

You see a little bit of Astaire in everybody's dancing--a pause here, a move there. It was all Astaire's originally.

There should not need to be a synopsis in the program. The movements and the music should express everything the audience needs to know.

It was sad and lonely to be left. You'd go to church and stand there for some time. The school had a chapel. The maser would be there with maybe two or three other students. You had to kill time before dinner. I would go to the reception hall and play the piano. There was no one there, total emptiness.