There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence.

Classical ballet will never die.

There's nothing in the world that isn't good, bad, and indifferent.

First of all, the most important, that is to learn everything good that has survived from other times, and carefully to watch the bad - and throw it out.

You can't stop what comes into a country, you can be influenced, but you can't stop it, you shouldn't, because it makes all the others interesting, we all get muddled up together, and produce something that belongs to everyone.

God gave us all exactly the same fingers, arms, legs, and feet, but in our different countries we divided them all a little differently as we feel it, do you understand?

Oh yes, technique has definitely advanced. But you never advance without losing something en passant, and you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing.

Hardly any generation wants to take the whole of the last generation, it just wants to take its best bits.

Well, I mean, we are developing the other parts, and we can't give quite all our attention to the upper part, but soon the lower parts will be developed, and the upper part and the lower part will become partners, that will be wonderful.

It's either not good enough and dies altogether, or it develops.

There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence.

All the children in the school should learn the steps of everything, before they learn the thing, then they know which step they're doing better, because your voice is in certain steps and has to do most of the things that have been composed in those steps.

Exactly the same with dancing, you can't dance until you've learnt steps, the things your feet can do.

Nearly everything in life goes in threes and fours.

The best way to study is to go to the Cecchetti method for about a year and draw onto all the highest points and then put that into the general method.

Oh yes, after the war, and we were all starving - we had no proper food or anything - no proper shoes.

As time goes on, all schools only get left alive if they have found something special themselves.

Somebody must always be doing something new, or life would get very dull.

So it takes years to make a solid company.

And then you have the classical ballerinas, they're like sopranos. Applied to the dance.

Also, if you have an accident, you can't start to dance again at the top, you're too weak; you start with the easy things - the way you did them when you were young, and come up up up, the way you did then.

You cannot create genius. All you can do is nurture it.

Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started.

I wanted to be a ballet teacher.

Classical ballet will never die.

I've got no plans to be a ballet dancer at the moment.

When life takes me on a new journey, I simply remember the smile my first ballet recital put on my face and I move forward.

Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.

The moment the curtain rose on that first ballet, I knew something wonderful and new had come into my life. I can still see the first scene. The ballet was Divertimento No. 15.

My grandmother had a Miss Margaret's School of Dance to teach tap and ballet to kids, but I never studied it. I was raised a Mormon and they're dancing fools. It's the only vice they have - dancing.

The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.

My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.

However, the moral center of New York City, I believe, is the New York City Ballet.

I have ballet class every other day for two hours. And for "Six Feet Under", last week there was a sequence where I had to do a whole choreographed dance number, so I had four hours of dance practice every day.

I do take class because I still dance, and yes, I do slip into class with the Royal Ballet from time to time.

And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.

It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.

For 24 hours a day, for 10 years, all I thought about was being in a band. That's all I did. I had no other social life. I don't want my life to be like that now. I've spent the past 10 years having a real life as well. But Spandau Ballet is such a difficult shadow to outrun.

When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire.

The New York City Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that.

I used to dance when I was younger - ballet and modern dance.

At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life.

I went to ballet school for nine years, and there was an agent for the whole school who happened to be there visiting one of the performances. She suggested an audition.

Wrestling is ballet with violence.

My Mom is a ballet director, so I had this idea in me that classical training is the best foundation for anything you do, so I wanted to get a classical background and voice.

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.

I grew up studying ballet; I grew up honing my craft.

Figure skating is an unlikely Olympic event but its good television. It's sort of a combination of gymnastics and ballet. A little sexy too which doesn't hurt.

I started taking ballet lessons when I was three and a half and I still take dance classes.