60 Quotes by George Balanchine

The woman's function is to fascinate men.

I am a cloud - in trousers.

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

My muse must come to me on union time.

They are poets of gesture.

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

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?

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.

Ballet will speak for itself. About itself.