Nobody is born a dancer.
— Mikhail Baryshnikov
I - you know, I'm not an actor.
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.
Your heart is very much connected to your mind.
I am teaching more. That is what I do best.
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.
I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.
I am not the first straight dancer or the last.
I go a lot to see young people downtown in little theaters. It's great. If you start somebody's career, it's so exciting.
Dancing is my obsession. My life.
Dancers are stripped enough onstage. You don't have to know more about them than they've given you already.
People of art should never get married and have children, because it's a selfish experience.
Astaire was not a sexual animal, but he made his partners look so extraordinarily related to him.
To walk across the street is a risk.
I have been very lucky to work in so many new ballets, but that is what a dancer's work is.
I have the life of seven cats.
My mother had a son from previous marriage and her husband died in Second World War.
Dances have a second and third life. You feel they are never ready. They always have a chance for another life.
I don't want to do anything Freudian.
Obviously, the young dancers lack a certain air of maturity.
I was very restless. I really wanted to be a part of a kind of a progressive society. I was fed up with these Communist doctrines and you were hassled all the time with members of the Party committee who were KGB, what you have to do, where in the West you can go or not to go.
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.
The Russian people get so insanely close to each other as friends. Their lives are interrelated so much on an everyday basis.
I want to do exactly what I want to do. I'd rather gamble on the box office than beg for a grant.
You cannot be happy with your family while being personally unhappy with your work. It's a Catch-22 kind of thing.
I think art education, especially in this country, which government pretty much ignores, is so important for young people.
I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.
I feel very uneasy with a lot of aspects of the Russian life and the Russian people.
It's what's left in life, to work with interesting people.
Working is living to me.
I read Russian literature a lot.
Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.
I miss horribly those couple of hours before the performance when you get into the theater and you see people.
I have made mistakes.
Running a company is pretty demanding.
In '74 it was really a very gloomy atmosphere, I would say, to put it mildly.
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.
I kind of lost interest in the classical dance. I was very much interested in the modern choreography.
I cannot belong to a nonprofit organization because when you receive grants, you have to make such great compromises with your artistic plans.
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.
I get speeding ticket like everybody else. If the restaurant is full I'm waiting in line like everybody else.
I really reject that kind of comparison that says, Oh, he is the best. This is the second best. There is no such thing.
Creative Artists Agency put together a project of extraordinary mediocrity and colossal stupidity. Otherwise, it was great.
Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important.
No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.
