Ninette de Valois

“Well, I mean, we are developing the other parts, and we can't give quite all our attention to the upper part, but soon the lower parts will be developed, and the upper part and the lower part will become partners, that will be wonderful.”

“Somebody must always be doing something new, or life would get very dull.”

“Classical ballet will never die.”

“There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence.”

“Oh yes, technique has definitely advanced. But you never advance without losing something en passant, and you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing.”

“The best way to study is to go to the Cecchetti method for about a year and draw onto all the highest points and then put that into the general method.”

“Also, if you have an accident, you can't start to dance again at the top, you're too weak; you start with the easy things - the way you did them when you were young, and come up up up, the way you did then.”

“Nearly everything in life goes in threes and fours.”

“You can't stop what comes into a country, you can be influenced, but you can't stop it, you shouldn't, because it makes all the others interesting, we all get muddled up together, and produce something that belongs to everyone.”

“All the children in the school should learn the steps of everything, before they learn the thing, then they know which step they're doing better, because your voice is in certain steps and has to do most of the things that have been composed in those steps.”

“Hardly any generation wants to take the whole of the last generation, it just wants to take its best bits.”

“There's nothing in the world that isn't good, bad, and indifferent.”

“As time goes on, all schools only get left alive if they have found something special themselves.”

“God gave us all exactly the same fingers, arms, legs, and feet, but in our different countries we divided them all a little differently as we feel it, do you understand?”

“Exactly the same with dancing, you can't dance until you've learnt steps, the things your feet can do.”

“It's either not good enough and dies altogether, or it develops.”

“So it takes years to make a solid company.”

“First of all, the most important, that is to learn everything good that has survived from other times, and carefully to watch the bad - and throw it out.”

“Oh yes, after the war, and we were all starving - we had no proper food or anything - no proper shoes.”

“And then you have the classical ballerinas, they're like sopranos. Applied to the dance.”