It's the emotional trigger points that are important to me because I know if I could believe in the characters and try and imagine how they felt then I'd be able to do something quite honest.

No one was creating and I always wanted to be created on.

Mostly, I'm in the very enviable position that no one dictates what I do.

And dance is wonderful because dance is so immediate.

I'm interested in people who can take the movement somewhere.

If the year 2000 can help us move into the future, that's fine, but I am afraid that people see it as a full stop and that one can take a big breath afterwards - you can't.

We moved, and there was a golden era in the '40s when we were so conscious of who we were as Australians.

I look at the dancers and I get the inspiration for the work from them.

Dance is so joyous.

We also tour nationally and internationally.

It's not a company of exponents of my style.

I think the Olympics could help us reach more people.

There's a line of dancers waiting to get into Sydney Dance Company.

Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.

It's the emotional trigger points that are important to me because I know if I could believe in the characters and try and imagine how they felt then I'd be able to do something quite honest.

For me it was really important to get the essence out of the music for the story and not, sort of, press the music into the service of the whimsical telling of it.

But I also wanted to give them an intelligent emotional journey, without having to suspend reality - to be able to look at those characters and see reasons for the relationships and why what happens happens.

I wanted to give people - which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really - I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet - in a very pure form.

And currently, there are four to five new works in the pipeline for upcoming celebrations such as the Sydney 2000 Olympics, Australian Federation, my 50th Birthday, and Sydney Dance Company's 25th Anniversary.

I think it requires a bit of honesty, Swan Lake.

I don't think people we'll miss the fact that SDC is way up there and that our profile is high.

I'm thrilled at the moment because our audiences, you know, they... the demographic is 50% male.

Yes, Carl Vine stuck around. He's now number one composer for choreography.

SDC has a great reputation for putting live music on stage.

I always figure I have this tree and there's always some green fruit that's not ready to pick or blossoms that are ready to flower; there are always some ready to drop off too.

Sydney is a very good market for us - we have a very strong following here.

I'm in the position to pick the cream of the crop.

We can't afford big symphonies but we commission works that sound rich and symphonic because of the nature of the instrumentation and the people we work with.

I actually build my dreams around the dancers I've got in my company.

I mean, I think in the early days we were pretty... pretty British in our entertainment leads.

The jokes are great but what really matters for a comedian is his performance, his whole attitude, and the laughs that he gets between the jokes rather than on top of the jokes.

Human rights are the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.

The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one.

The greatest treasure in life is the possession of time.

I often have deer on my property and there's a fox and owls. You're not going to see that in the city.

You can't stumble upon something new and wonderful if you don't have time to stumble.

Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis.

In life every effort is marked down at the end as a win or a loss.

If you push through the hard days you can get through anything.

And once the music is out there, when you're selling a record and selling music and people are going to do whatever they want with it, it's kind of hard to resist certain opportunities, especially in the record market now.

I loved going to superhero films growing up - you come home, and you pretend to be those people, and it ends up informing much of what you aspire to be. And that's what I will say is important about the genre.

People know my background and for people who need an improviser, I'm one of the people they think to use if I'm appropriate for the part.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

The key is trying to go quick without killing your tyres.

I'm quite sensitive to people noticing me. There are times when I'm relaxed, then others when it does make me self-conscious.

Architects always have a feel for time - the generation they live in - as we do, and they are always striving toward boundless adventure.

In every success story, you will find someone who has made a courageous decision.

The amount of work and the amount of both physical and emotional investment it takes to get to the top.

What do we mean by soft matter? Americans prefer to call it 'complex fluids.' This is a rather ugly name, which tends to discourage the young students.