Mikhail Baryshnikov Quotations | Page 2

If your only dance experience is the Nutcracker, it will be a shock; hopefully shocking in a good way.

To achieve some depth in your field requires a lot of sacrifices.

You don't measure life by receiving awards.

Nobody is born a dancer.

What do dancers think of Fred Astaire? It's no secret. We hate him. He gives us a complex because he's too perfect. His perfection is an absurdity. It's too hard to face.

I want to see people dance, and I would like to guess what kind of people they are. I don't want to know the recipe for their pasta.

The problem is not making up the steps but deciding which ones to keep.

Just sit and open your eyes and open your heart. It's dance theater.

Working is living to me.

We're trying to stretch our muscles creatively. It gives us so much more freedom.

Dance is an ephemeral, a fleeting art. To describe this momentum, every movement on stage, in words is virtually impossible.

Perfection is a theory. You cannot be a perfect human being, perfect artist. You cannot be a perfect husband, you cannot be a perfect father probably and probably I am not. But go through your daily routine with hope you will be a little better in all respects, and do something meaningful

Be. Good. To yourself, to other people, to everything you do. It's a norm of life by which people should try to live. Don't waste time. Be interesting and interested.

No one is born a dancer. You have to want it more than anything.

It doesn't matter how high you lift your leg. The technique is about transparency, simplicity, making an earnest attempt.

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.

Divinity of art, it's such a mystery. How to convince people that no matter how much money you can spend on education and art education especially, that it implants, it directs a young person for the rest of their lives, and always in the most humane and positive and dignified manner.

When a dancer comes onstage, he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life Each time, he has chosen, and in what he is onstage, you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, and the person who, at this point, he cannot help but be Exceptional dancers, in my experience, are also exceptional people, people with an attitude toward life, a kind of quest, and an internal quality. They know who they are, and they show this to you, willingly.