Mikhail Baryshnikov Quotes
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If your only dance experience is the Nutcracker, it will be a shock; hopefully shocking in a good way.
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I like to go to anybody else's birthday, and if I'm invited I'm a good guest. But I never celebrate my birthdays. I really don't care.
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You see, dancers are quite mature people because they start performing so early. They become professionals when they start to take everyday classes.
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People of art should never get married and have children, because it's a selfish experience.
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I feel very uneasy with a lot of aspects of the Russian life and the Russian people.
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I have been very lucky to work in so many new ballets, but that is what a dancer's work is.
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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.
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You cannot be happy with your family while being personally unhappy with your work. It's a Catch-22 kind of thing.
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My mother had a son from previous marriage and her husband died in Second World War.
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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.
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I am teaching more. That is what I do best.
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Dancing is my obsession. My life.
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I've always said, 'I am a selector, I am not defector' - the first few phrases in English I learned. I said I hate 'defector'; something defective about the people. It's a bad word.
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I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.
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Obviously, the young dancers lack a certain air of maturity.
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To achieve some depth in your field requires a lot of sacrifices. Want to or not, you're thinking about what you're doing in life-in my case, dancing.
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The more injuries you get, the smarter you get.
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Just sit and open your eyes and open your heart. It's dance theater.
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He Astaire was not a sexual animal, but he made his partners look so extraordinarily related to him.
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No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.
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I gave away a lot of works for benefits and then people would also give me back.
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I have some Russian friends. But probably only 10 percent. I don't hang out usually in the big Russian communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey.
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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.
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Divinity of art, it's such a mystery. How to convince people that no matter how much money you can spend on education and art education especially, that it implants, it directs a young person for the rest of their lives, and always in the most humane and positive and dignified manner.