Mikhail Baryshnikov's Quotes

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 would like to go and dance in Palestine one day, with great pleasure, great pleasure.

I'm a news junkie.

I've been hurt quite a few times.

In '74 it was really a very gloomy atmosphere, I would say, to put it mildly.

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.

It's what's left in life, to work with interesting people.

My mother had a son from previous marriage and her husband died in Second World War.

Nobody else in the world has a form like the Native American musical, and Americans should be very proud.

Nobody is born a dancer.

Nothing is ever too expensive if it furthers the repertoire and artistic standards of a dance company.

Now there is in a way a renaissance of modern dance - suddenly, it is more respected and discovered.

Obviously, the young dancers lack a certain air of maturity.

People dance at any age.

Running a company is pretty demanding.

The Russian people get so insanely close to each other as friends. Their lives are interrelated so much on an everyday basis.

When I see people on the street, I look at how they walk. It's like a signature, a fingerprint.

When I'm alone, I work sometimes with music, sometimes without and sometimes just listening to NPR.

Working is living to me.

Your heart is very much connected to your mind.

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.

I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We lived, until I was 12 or so, in communal apartment with five different families and the same kitchen, in two little - my brother and me and my parents. It was hell, but it was a common thing. My father was not general or admiral, but he was colonel. He was teaching in military academy military topography.

I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.

I think art education, especially in this country, which government pretty much ignores, is so important for young people.

Dancers are stripped enough onstage. You don't have to know more about them than they've given you already.

No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.

I really reject that kind of comparison that says, Oh, he is the best. This is the second best. There is no such thing.

Dancing is my obsession. My life.

The more injuries you get, the smarter you get.

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.

Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important.

I am not the first straight dancer or the last.

People of art should never get married and have children, because it's a selfish experience.

You cannot be happy with your family while being personally unhappy with your work. It's a Catch-22 kind of thing.

A country like Belgium, or socialist countries in central Europe spend more money on art education than the United States, which is a really puzzling thought.

I get speeding ticket like everybody else. If the restaurant is full I'm waiting in line like everybody else.

In the second part of life you get rid of stuff you've accumulated.

Although I don't gamble in life - I've never played poker - I do gamble on stage. I gamble with myself: 'Can I do this?'

Astaire was not a sexual animal, but he made his partners look so extraordinarily related to him.

Creative Artists Agency put together a project of extraordinary mediocrity and colossal stupidity. Otherwise, it was great.

I cannot stand authority.

I want to do exactly what I want to do. I'd rather gamble on the box office than beg for a grant.

To walk across the street is a risk.

You see, dancers are quite mature people because they start performing so early. They become professionals when they start to take everyday classes.

Your body actually reminds you about your age and your injuries - the body has a stronger memory than your mind.

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.

Dances have a second and third life. You feel they are never ready. They always have a chance for another life.

To put up a show is to face life's injustices with one of the few weapons available to a desperate and brave people, their imagination.

Public and private food in America has become eatable, here and there extremely good. Only the fried potatoes go unchanged, as deadly as before.

They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fisherman's octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach.