Quotes by Mikhail Baryshnikov

• I am not the first straight dancer or the last.
• I kind of lost interest in the classical dance. I was very much interested in the modern choreography.
• No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.
• It's what's left in life, to work with interesting people.
• 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.
• I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.
• 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 want to do exactly what I want to do. I'd rather gamble on the box office than beg for a grant.
• Working is living to me.
• I think art education, especially in this country, which government pretty much ignores, is so important for young people.
• I really reject that kind of comparison that says, Oh, he is the best. This is the second best. There is no such thing.
• People of art should never get married and have children, because it's a selfish experience.
• 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 have been very lucky to work in so many new ballets, but that is what a dancer's work is.
• 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.
• I get speeding ticket like everybody else. If the restaurant is full I'm waiting in line like everybody else.
• I cannot belong to a nonprofit organization because when you receive grants, you have to make such great compromises with your artistic plans.
• Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important.
• 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.
• Creative Artists Agency put together a project of extraordinary mediocrity and colossal stupidity. Otherwise, it was great.
• 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.
• You cannot be happy with your family while being personally unhappy with your work. It's a Catch-22 kind of thing.
• I feel very uneasy with a lot of aspects of the Russian life and the Russian people.
• The Russian people get so insanely close to each other as friends. Their lives are interrelated so much on an everyday basis.
• To dance is to speak a language that transcends words, expressing the music of the soul.