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What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then... it's gone.

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

At least in my performances, the audience has become so diverse in a way that I don't think ballet has ever experienced.

The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.

There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.

As for the once-revolutionary 'Agon,' after more than half a century, its lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional.

I've always been excited by the strangeness of ballet, but I can't bear it when people just come forward and do a turn in the air for no reason.

I never studied dance, but if you look at 'Wild At Heart,' my mother saw that movie and said, 'You are a dancer. Look at how you're moving: all that strange energy is like modern dance.'

With dancing, so much is about sexuality and sensuality and without life experience it becomes much more of a performance, rather than a living, breathing entity from the soul.

Dance has such an intensity to it. You become, in a way, an intense person.