Ailey Quotes

#1. I danced growing up. I had two friends of mine that, actually, one of them wound up dancing with Alvin Ailey.

Lisa Ann Walter

#2. My dad is a director/producer and my mom is a dancer; she performed with Alvin Ailey, but I didn't even think about becoming an actress.

Sanaa Lathan

#3. He was destined to die lying in the dust with a knife in his ribs anyway. A pointless death. He'd always known it. Ailey was the only one who had ever asked for him to be anything more.

Jeannie Lin

#4. I'm born originally in Toronto, and I have what I call my 'Fame' story. I took a Greyhound bus and went to Alvin Ailey and received Dunham, Horton, Graham technique there, but I could never take my eyes off of Balanchine doing 'Nutcracker'; to me he's the best who ever did it.

Laurieann Gibson

#5. Boy - before intense anxiety had crushed his chances for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and sent him into the awful mental decline in which he'd been made a vampire.

Anne Rice

#6. I wanted to be an Ailey dancer. I would watch Alvin Ailey videos over and over, and I'd picture myself doing that. I was obsessed with it.

Robert Battle

#7. I'm going to spend every night of my life kissing away your memories of him. I'm going to find places he never kissed and our first times will be a thousand times sweeter than your first times with him. Isabel you are the love of my life. -Alex Ailey

Christine Brae

#8. All my life I've been fascinated by the precipice in all of us. When you come to it, you either choose to fall or you don't
Alvin Ailey

Kathy Petrakis

#9. I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn't care, I was free.

Madonna Ciccone

#10. As long as there are dancers around who love to dance, there will be an Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. We miss him so much, but he's alive as soon as you see a dancer hit the stage.

Judith Jamison

#11. I always want more.

Alvin Ailey

#12. My dancers must be able to do anything, and I don't care if they are black or white or purple or green. I want to help show my people how beautiful they are. I want to hold up the mirror to my audience that says this is the way people can be, this is how open people can be.

Alvin Ailey

#13. Racism tears down your insides so that no matter what you achieve, you're not quite up to snuff.

Alvin Ailey

#14. I always want to have more dancers in my company.

Alvin Ailey

#15. The creative process is not controlled by a switch you can simply turn on or off; it's with you all the time.

Alvin Ailey

#16. I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation.

Alvin Ailey

#17. Nothing personal; I just don't have people over.

Alvin Ailey

#18. I'm attracted to long-legged girls with long arms and a little head.

Alvin Ailey

#19. Sometimes you feel bad about yourself when there's no reason to.

Alvin Ailey

#20. My feelings about myself have been terrible.

Alvin Ailey

#21. One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people.

Alvin Ailey

#22. Everything in dancing is style, allusion, the essence of many thoughts and feelings. The abstraction of many moments.

Alvin Ailey

#23. No matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it's not enough.

Alvin Ailey

#24. My lasting impression of Truman Capote is that he was a terribly gentle, terribly sensitive, and terribly sad man.

Alvin Ailey

#25. One of the processes of your life is to constantly break down that inferiority, to constantly reaffirm that I Am Somebody.

Alvin Ailey

#26. Lena Horne is the sweetest and most adorable woman in the world.

Alvin Ailey

#27. Money is a never-ending problem.

Alvin Ailey

#28. I am trying to show the world that we are all human beings and that color is not important. What is important is the quality of our work.

Alvin Ailey

#29. Choreography is mentally draining, but there's a pleasure in getting into the studio with the dancers and the music.

Alvin Ailey

#30. Dance is for everybody. I believe that the dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people.

Alvin Ailey

#31. It will take very sophisticated marketing to achieve our aim of bringing more black people into the theater.

Alvin Ailey

#32. Making dances is an act of progress; it is an act of growth, an act of music, an act of teaching, an act of celebration, an act of joy.

Alvin Ailey

#33. To be who you are and become what you are capable of is the only goal worth living.

Alvin Ailey

#34. In this business, life is one long fund-raising effort.

Alvin Ailey

#35. We still spend more time chasing funds than we do in the studio in creative work.

Alvin Ailey

#36. There was still no likelihood that we could make a living from dance. We were doing it because we loved it ... We realized how full we felt; we were surrounded by music and dancing and joy.

Alvin Ailey

#37. If you live in the elite world of dance, you find yourself in a world rife with racism. Let's face it.

Alvin Ailey

#38. But the dance speaks to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn't work.

Alvin Ailey