106 Quotes by Sylvie Guillem

Ballet is hard enough when you go with it; when you have to force your body to do things, it is so much harder.

There's a picture of me as a little girl, and I'm waiting to go onstage, and I am biting the last bit of nail I have left on my finger.

If we keep on destroying fish, there won't be any left. If the oceans die, we all die. It's as simple as that.

As a professional ballet dancer, I have to accept that weekends are about work. The notion of a leisurely break with all the buzz and excitement of a Friday night simply doesn't exist for me.

If you start dancing too young, it can be torture. The bone is too soft, and it is going everywhere.

As much as I love my work, I do appreciate my rare days off. Even then, I can't afford to let the dancing go. I need at least an hour just to keep in shape, so wherever I am in the world, I'll grab the door or the furniture and do some serious exercise.

I love nature like nothing else. Before I moved to Switzerland, my home was a flat in London with a garden. In those snatched moments away from dance, I did typical weekend things like pruning, planting, and weeding. I planted fruit trees and even had a vegetable garden, but I wasn't around enough, so it was a disaster.

I had no sense of having reached some goal because I was an etoile at the Paris Opera. My ambition, if you can call it that, was to discover and learn and be excited by what I was doing. If I didn't have that, I would find it elsewhere.

I think the only regret I have is not to have opened my eyes sooner to aspects of life like the relationship of man with nature and animals.