Quotes About George Balanchine

#1. 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is one of George Balanchine's greatest creations - and one of the greatest of all story ballets.

Robert Gottlieb

#2. Ballet will speak for itself. About itself.

George Balanchine

#3. One is born to be a great dancer.

George Balanchine

#4. 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.

George Balanchine

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

George Balanchine

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

George Balanchine

#7. 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.

George Balanchine

#8. Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.

George Balanchine

#9. Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.

George Balanchine

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

George Balanchine

#11. I have no literary approach - except to literature.

George Balanchine

#12. They are poets of gesture.

George Balanchine

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

George Balanchine

#14. Dance is music made visible

George Balanchine

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

George Balanchine

#16. The woman's function is to fascinate men.

George Balanchine

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

George Balanchine

#18. Music must be seen, and dance must be heard

George Balanchine

#19. My muse must come to me on union time.

George Balanchine

#20. 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 *

George Balanchine

#21. I am a cloud - in trousers.

George Balanchine

#22. Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.

George Balanchine

#23. 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.

George Balanchine

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

George Balanchine

#25. Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

George Balanchine

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

George Balanchine

#27. I can always invent movement, and sometimes it can be fitted into the right place, but that is not choreography. It is the music that dictates the whole shape of the work. I do not believe in the permanence of anything in ballet save the purely classical.

George Balanchine

#28. The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.

George Balanchine

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

George Balanchine

#30. Storyless is not abstract. Two dancers on the stage are enough material for a story; for me, they are already a story in themselves

George Balanchine

#31. It's like the time capsule with everything in it. Or like the seed that when you plant it, becomes the enormous tree with leaves and fruit. Everybody was in that little seed, and so everything can open. The tree of dance is like that. It just takes a long, long time to blossom.

George Balanchine

#32. 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.

George Balanchine

#33. I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating. If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?

George Balanchine

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

George Balanchine

#35. See the music, hear the dance.

George Balanchine