Quotes from George Balanchine

If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?

It is the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician. If the illusion fails the ballet fails, no matter how well a program note tells the audience that it has succeeded.

If you like something of someone else's, why not take it? The important thing is that it seem natural and fit in.

Choreography is like cooking or gardening. Not like painting because painting stays. Dancing disintegrates. Like a garden. Lots of roses come up, and in the evening they're gone.

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense, but see, policemen don't have to be beautiful at the same time.

Dance has to look like the music. If you see music simply as an accompaniment, then you don't hear it. I occupy myself with how not to interfere with the music.

When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, "What do you mean? What is your significance?" Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We're like flowers. A flower doesn't tell you a story. It's in itself a beautiful thing.

He is terribly rare. He is like Bach, who in his time had a great concentration of ability, essence, knowledge, a spread of music. Astaire has that same concentration of genius; there is so much of the dance in him that it has been distilled.

Don't think, dear, do.

I wonder if you'd like to do a little ballet with me. A polka, perhaps. For some elephants.

Publicity overrates everything. Picasso's overrated. I'm overrated. Even Jack Benny's overrated.

In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.

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

Ballet is the one place where art flourishes because of a woman; woman is the goddess, the poetess, the muse. That is why I have a company with beautiful girl dancers.

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.

See the music, hear the dance.

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But i dont agree with that because policeman don't have to look beautiful at the same time" *

Dancing is music made visible.

What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is.

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...

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

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense. But I dont agree with that because policemen don't have to look beautiful at the same time.

I like to do things certain ways and I disagree with everybody but I don't even want to argue.

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.