To stay around any place you love, you have to have a job. In college at Georgetown in the fifties, I got my first theater job checking coats at the National, which was Washington's main theater.

The ballet makes us look at those bodies, it makes us listen to that music, it makes us wonder at the geometry, of the way they come together. The way that extraordinary space is controlled and given such emotional force.

Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York.

I mean New York City is the financial capital of the world. It's where all the money passes through, the Dow Jones, whatever, that's where all the money goes.

You have to take things with a lot of laughter. I laugh with everyone; this way, I will be able to die happy.

But paying is part of the game of life: it is the joy of buying that we crave.

Our society's sort of turning into a two-class system, where... most of the wealth and privileges are being concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. And there's the rest of us... that have to go out and work and struggle and live and die and try to find some happiness and contentment and security.

Rather than have joy, I would rather be absent of pain.