Gene Kelly Quotes

#1. I'll never starve.

Gene Kelly

#2. I got started dancing because I knew it was one way to meet girls.

Gene Kelly

#3. Things danced on the screen do not look the way they do on the stage. On the stage, dancing is three-dimensional, but a motion picture is two-dimensional.

Gene Kelly

#4. Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat.

Gene Kelly

#5. Come on with the rain / I've a smile on my face.

Gene Kelly

#6. At 14 I discovered girls. At that time dancing was the only way you could put your arm around the girl. Dancing was courtship.

Gene Kelly

#7. My mother had gotten a job as a receptionist at a dancing school and had the idea that we should open our own dancing school; we did, and it prospered.

Gene Kelly

#8. When Ginger Rogers danced with Astaire, it was the only time in the movies when you looked at the man, not the woman.

Gene Kelly

#9. I'd studied dance in Chicago every summer end taught it all winter, and I was well-rounded. I wasn't worried about getting a job on Broadway. In fact, I got one the first week.

Gene Kelly

#10. I never wanted to be a dancer. It's true! I wanted to be a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Gene Kelly

#11. There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy.

Gene Kelly

#12. I didn't want to move or act like a rich man. I wanted to dance in a pair of jeans. I wanted to dance like the man in the streets.

Gene Kelly

#13. I took it as it came and it happened to be very nice.

Gene Kelly

#14. If Fred Astaire is the Cary Grant of dance, I'm the Marlon Brando.

Gene Kelly

#15. Dignity, always Dignity!

Gene Kelly

#16. I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.

Gene Kelly

#17. I arrived in Hollywood twenty pounds overweight and as strong as an ox.

Gene Kelly

#18. Any man who looks like a sissy while dancing is just a lousy dancer.

Gene Kelly

#19. I may be rancid butter, but I'm on your side of the bread.

Gene Kelly

#20. I wanted to do new things with dance, adapt it to the motion picture medium.

Gene Kelly

#21. She's one of those third year girls who gripe my liver ... You know, American college kids. They come over here to take their third year and lap up a little culture ... They're officious and dull. They're always making profound observations they've overheard.

Gene Kelly

#22. I still find it almost impossible to relax for more than one day at a time.

Gene Kelly

#23. The finest all-around performer we ever had in America was Judy Garland. There was no limit to her talent. She was the quickest, brightest person I ever worked with.

Gene Kelly

#24. I didn't want to be a dancer. I just did it to work my way through college. But I was always an athlete and gymnast, so it came naturally.

Gene Kelly

#25. The way I look at a musical, you are commenting on the human condition no matter what you do. A musical may be light and frivolous, but by its very nature, it makes some kind of social comment.

Gene Kelly

#26. You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams. And I know if I can make you smile by jumping over a couple of couches or running through a rainstorm, then I'll be very glad to be a song and dance man.

Gene Kelly

#27. I think dancing is a man's game and if he does it well he does it better than a woman.

Gene Kelly

#28. Kids talk to me and say they want to do musicals again because they've studied the tapes of the old films. We didn't have that. We thought once we had made it, even on film, it was gone except for the archives.

Gene Kelly