I mean New York City is the financial capital of the world. It’s where all the money passes through, the Dow Jones, whatever, that’s where all the money goes.

It’s amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.

What we’re dealt with hopefully is two arms, two eyes, two legs, a head, a heart. The variations, the extensions, the possibilities of the human body, what that can do.

I think of the New York City Ballet as the Yankees without George Steinbrenner.

Verona, in our minds, was San Juan,

All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs.

I think that every year that the New York City Ballet is alive is worthy of celebration. Because otherwise the terrible thing is just that we take it for granted.

Mel said, ‘Just make it your own.’ And she said, ‘I’ll kiss each several paper for amends. Aye, mira, here is writ ‘kind Julia.’ Mel and I just looked at each other – ‘There’s the...

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.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

The only riots were the people trying to get tickets.

And we remember it as it was when we first saw Maria Tallchief or Suzanne Farrell in it. And now it’s Wendy Whelan, it’s tomorrow’s dancer.

Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.

That’s why Puccini’s work is so alive – because he creates such extraordinary pieces of theater. It’s not dependent on personality.

a 33-year-old man wrote that in a matter of weeks. A 67-year-old man can’t come back to it.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

The ballet makes us look at those bodies, it makes us listen to that music, it makes us wonder at the geometry, of the way they come together. The way that extraordinary space is controlled...

We just didn’t care,

Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That’s the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.

The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.

the little children that their favorite song is Taps.

Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York.

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...

Two Gentlemen

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

Antony and Cleopatra.

[The cast, headed by Raul Julia as Proteus, was painstakingly multiracial.] The idea was to have someone to represent every neighborhood in New York, … great separatism … we wanted to have the spirit of...

I believe that the New York City Ballet, its practical value is that it’s about expansion of human possibilities. It’s about healing. It’s about food.

I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.

The weirdest thing was that we rehearsed in the exact same room we rehearsed in 34 years ago, … When I went into the washroom and looked in the mirror, I thought, ‘Who is this...