Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are, I don't quite know how I'm going to do them, because I haven't lived that moment yet. I always feel very insecure and I get very excited.

I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.

There is pain and sacrifice in everyone's world. That's why, when I was dancing, I had no pain.

So dancing was not something I had a great desire to do.

When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.

I used to love to play dress-up, where you get your mother's or your grandmother's dresses and high heels.

I could work out a lot of my emotions by going to class and dancing.

I didn't have any doubts about my choice of career, but I had constant doubts about my ability, yes.

I had two sisters, and we would love to get dressed up and pretend that we were chic, sophisticated ladies. And I think that was a great sort of preparation, in a way.

Of course, in the art class, I was the model.

And I just thought, this is what I want to be. And I knew that dancing would be my chosen profession.

I had a wonderful childhood, coming from Cincinnati, and I think that it was great going into the life that I was going to have, where you have to start young as a dancer.

As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate.

But what was my motivation was music, and the fact that I love to move around. I'm always moving around.

You don't learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don't really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time.

I was very much of a tomboy.

On the other hand, I think it is wonderful for everyone to take ballet classes, at any age. It gives you a discipline, it gives you a place to go. It gives you some control in your life.

Once I started dancing, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was as a child.

It's ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven't lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else.

I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do.

I liked to read but, being a dancer, I didn't have a lot of time to read.

The particular ballet was not so important as the fact that I was physically healthy, and capable of getting out there and dancing as often as possible.

That the work involved, the willingness to take chances, the commitment, the opportunity to get on stage and make people happy, was more important than becoming famous, or even what I was dancing.

The body can do amazing things in a situation when it is really called for.

Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are, I don't quite know how I'm going to do them, because I haven't lived that moment yet. I always feel very insecure and I get very excited.

In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child.

I learned to love dance for its own sake.

I loved tests because it was another form of competing, a healthy competition.

I think especially in a world where you have so little say about what goes on in your life, or in the politics of the world around you, it is wonderful to go into that studio, and tell yourself what to do.

When you get on stage, you can be anything. You are removed from reality in a way, the real world.

I liked tap, because I liked hearing the results of my movements.

I'm thought of as a cool, unemotional dancer, but inside I'm not.

The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

There's no male Oprah.

The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid.

On issues carrying as much emotional freight as race - and there aren't many - a U.S. senator needs to speak with care and consistency. Otherwise, he could find people speaking at his own retirement tribute.

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Over and over I marvel at the blessings of my life Each year has grown better than the last.

Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect. I kind of want to know what happened there because we're twirling knobs here on Earth without knowing the consequences of it. Mars once had running water. It's bone dry today. Something bad happened there as well.

I really enjoyed the last scene at the Ewok celebration after the battle.

I coined this term 'freedom thru limitation' back in the '90s because I was sick of art being treated like pop, because of this boring 'anything can be art' theory.

My best advice to entrepreneurs is this Forget about making mistakes just do it.

I do not believe in the eternity of the spirit. That contradicts my ideology.

I wish to note that intellectual property theft by a government represents the very essence of organized crime.

These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.

If a man will not work, he shall not eat.

I've always been about less government.

Theres a tendency especially among academics to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.

I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren't consumed by technology and television.