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I found that dance, music, and literature is how I made sense of the world... it pushed me to think of things bigger than lifes daily routines... to think beyond what is immediate or convenient.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
When a body moves, it's the most revealing thing. Dance for me a minute, and I'll tell you who you are.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
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I get speeding ticket like everybody else. If the restaurant is full I'm waiting in line like everybody else.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
I was never like, "collect, collect," like people who go to auctions. I never spent a serious amount of time because I don't have any time!
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
Nothing is ever too expensive if it furthers the repertoire and artistic standards of a dance company.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
It's weird when you see pieces of choreography that were done for you 15 or 20 years ago and now they are being done by another dance company.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
Perfection is a theory. You cannot be a perfect human being, perfect artist. You cannot be a perfect husband, you cannot be a perfect father probably and probably I am not. But go through your daily routine with hope you will be a little better in all respects, and do something meaningful
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
In opera tradition, when opera die-hard fans, there is a replacement of singer or singer wasn't at his or hers vocal best, doing something, they boo. Especially now that they pay hundreds of dollars for the ticket.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
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I would like to go and dance in Palestine one day, with great pleasure, great pleasure.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
You cannot be happy with your family while being personally unhappy with your work. It's a Catch-22 kind of thing.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
Dance is an ephemeral, a fleeting art. To describe this momentum, every movement on stage, in words is virtually impossible.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
I kind of lost interest in the classical dance. I was very much interested in the modern choreography.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
It's what's left in life, to work with interesting people.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
No one is born a dancer. You have to want it more than anything.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
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I really reject that kind of comparison that says, Oh, he is the best. This is the second best. There is no such thing.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
He is a male butterfly without the wings - the same kind of grace of a very young horse, so angular.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
Dancers are stripped enough onstage. You don't have to know more about them than they've given you already.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
I always had a kind of strange relationship with New York City, with total love affair in the beginning then retreat during the kind of conservatives of politics and real estate and business came, and then I am again kind of fighting for the justice to the city, to open the city for the artists.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
I feel very uneasy with a lot of aspects of the Russian life and the Russian people.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
I have been very lucky to work in so many new ballets, but that is what a dancer's work is.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
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When a dancer comes onstage, he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life. Each time, he has chosen, and in what he is onstage, you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, and the person who, at this point, he cannot help but be Exceptional dancers, in my experience, are also exceptional people, people with an attitude toward life, a kind of quest, and an internal quality. They know who they are, and they show this to you, willingly.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
In the second part of life you get rid of stuff you've accumulated.
Mikhail Baryshnikov -
You invest into the future, and that's how young people become human in best sense of it - through the great experience of listening a Müller symphony or to see a great play by Tennessee Williams, experience something in a ballet, in a film.
Mikhail Baryshnikov