Mikhail Baryshnikov Quotes
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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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My father was a Party member and he was a pretty high rank military officer under the colonel, junior colonel, I don't know the term. He was a total Stalinist. A bit with a streak of anti-Semitism and very shrewd man, a very kind of nervous man.
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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
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He is a male butterfly without the wings - the same kind of grace of a very young horse, so angular.
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What people will do to get away from boredom!
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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 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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I feel very uneasy with a lot of aspects of the Russian life and the Russian people.
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Obviously, the young dancers lack a certain air of maturity.
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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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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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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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We're trying to stretch our muscles creatively. It gives us so much more freedom.
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I am teaching more. That is what I do best.
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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.
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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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I cannot stand authority.
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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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No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.
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Dancing is my obsession. My life.
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The more injuries you get, the smarter you get.
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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.