My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language.

We could raise prodigious cities and create nations, and explore the universe.

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

I would gladly do it but I am suffering from social phobia. I cannot manage being in a crowd of people.

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.

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against...

We too could wrest iron from the bowels of the earth and fashion it into ships and machines.

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.

It could draw from a greater reservoir of freedom. The irony could develop an even greater ease.

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.

That started very early on, and then I guess I tried to close up this fissure with something that was accessible to me, and all I had was writing.

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.

As is said about most writers: on the one hand all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my...

Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism.

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.

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

Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds.

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

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

I cannot stand public attention, I just can’t. Of course, if I may I might write something instead.

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...

The system that judges the worth of women, the system that judges a woman’s worth through her youthful body and looks and not for what she does.

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.

I do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist.

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.

I’ve learned over the years that it doesn’t matter where you pitch in the rotation. For me, preparation is everything.

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

I do not want to have the feeling of writing “for eternity,” so to speak.

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...

I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc.

One night some short weeks ago, for the first time in her not always happy life, Marilyn Monroe’s soul sat down alone to a quiet supper from which it did not rise.

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

I have the feeling it will influence my future writing to the extent that without any material worries I could develop a greater ease, even lightheartedness, in my writing.

Why must we be eternally on our knees before the Kants and Hugos?

There’s a lot of bad isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.

Sex – the poor man’s polo.

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 think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.

All praise to the masters indeed, but we too could produce a Kant or a Hugo.

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

Life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.

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.

Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face – for...

Was not from a mixture of two races that the Titans sprang?

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.

There are two kinds of marriages – where the husband quotes the wife and where the wife quotes the husband.

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