Ailey Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes you feel bad about yourself when there's no reason to. — Alvin Ailey

Nothing personal; I just don't have people over. — Alvin Ailey

My dancers must be able to do anything, and I don't care if they are black or white or purple or green. I want to help show my people how beautiful they are. I want to hold up the mirror to my audience that says this is the way people can be, this is how open people can be. — Alvin Ailey

It will take very sophisticated marketing to achieve our aim of bringing more black people into the theater. — Alvin Ailey

When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time. — Wynton Marsalis

The creative process is not controlled by a switch you can simply turn on or off; it's with you all the time. — Alvin Ailey

My lasting impression of Truman Capote is that he was a terribly gentle, terribly sensitive, and terribly sad man. — Alvin Ailey

But the dance speaks to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn't work. — Alvin Ailey

After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company - terrific dancers, awful repertory - I'm finally accepting the inevitable: I'm not going to change my mind, and they're not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world? — Robert Gottlieb

I am trying to show the world that we are all human beings and that color is not important. What is important is the quality of our work. — Alvin Ailey

To be who you are and become what you are capable of is the only goal worth living. — Alvin Ailey

Boy - before intense anxiety had crushed his chances for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and sent him into the awful mental decline in which he'd been made a vampire. — Anne Rice

All my life I've been fascinated by the precipice in all of us. When you come to it, you either choose to fall or you don't
Alvin Ailey — Kathy Petrakis

There was still no likelihood that we could make a living from dance. We were doing it because we loved it ... We realized how full we felt; we were surrounded by music and dancing and joy. — Alvin Ailey

Choreography is mentally draining, but there's a pleasure in getting into the studio with the dancers and the music. — Alvin Ailey

I'm born originally in Toronto, and I have what I call my 'Fame' story. I took a Greyhound bus and went to Alvin Ailey and received Dunham, Horton, Graham technique there, but I could never take my eyes off of Balanchine doing 'Nutcracker'; to me he's the best who ever did it. — Laurieann Gibson

I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation. — Alvin Ailey

My dad is a director/producer and my mom is a dancer; she performed with Alvin Ailey, but I didn't even think about becoming an actress. — Sanaa Lathan

As long as there are dancers around who love to dance, there will be an Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. We miss him so much, but he's alive as soon as you see a dancer hit the stage. — Judith Jamison

I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn't care, I was free. — Madonna Ciccone

Lena Horne is the sweetest and most adorable woman in the world. — Alvin Ailey

Money is a never-ending problem. — Alvin Ailey

The way Alvin Ailey has transformed modern dance and dance in general is the fact of variety. It's a cornucopia of ways to move. There are choreographers in the company as - as diverse, as different from each other as Donald McKayle and Bill T. Jones, or Jawole Zollar and John Butler, Lar Lubovitch, you know, and Judith Jamison. — Judith Jamison

Dance is for everybody. I believe that the dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people. — Alvin Ailey

If you live in the elite world of dance, you find yourself in a world rife with racism. Let's face it. — Alvin Ailey

I'm going to spend every night of my life kissing away your memories of him. I'm going to find places he never kissed and our first times will be a thousand times sweeter than your first times with him. Isabel you are the love of my life. -Alex Ailey — Christine Brae

In this business, life is one long fund-raising effort. — Alvin Ailey

My feelings about myself have been terrible. — Alvin Ailey

I'm attracted to long-legged girls with long arms and a little head. — Alvin Ailey

Everything in dancing is style, allusion, the essence of many thoughts and feelings. The abstraction of many moments. — Alvin Ailey

No matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it's not enough. — Alvin Ailey

He was destined to die lying in the dust with a knife in his ribs anyway. A pointless death. He'd always known it. Ailey was the only one who had ever asked for him to be anything more. — Jeannie Lin

Making dances is an act of progress; it is an act of growth, an act of music, an act of teaching, an act of celebration, an act of joy. — Alvin Ailey

One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people. — Alvin Ailey

One of the processes of your life is to constantly break down that inferiority, to constantly reaffirm that I Am Somebody. — Alvin Ailey

We still spend more time chasing funds than we do in the studio in creative work. — Alvin Ailey

I always want more. — Alvin Ailey

I wanted to be an Ailey dancer. I would watch Alvin Ailey videos over and over, and I'd picture myself doing that. I was obsessed with it. — Robert Battle

I danced growing up. I had two friends of mine that, actually, one of them wound up dancing with Alvin Ailey. — Lisa Ann Walter

I always want to have more dancers in my company. — Alvin Ailey

DeFrantz's study ... is not the first book about the protean Ailey, who was born in hardscrabble Texas in 1931 and died in 1989 after creating close to 80 works. But it is perhaps the most comprehensive, combining biography, criticism, the analysis of dance criticism, and a sort of corporate history, siting the now firmly established Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in the international cultural landscape. — Alvin Ailey

I am trained, and I did do 'The Nutcracker' in its right form, but at the time, they told me I was black and I'd never be in 'Swan Lake.' I went through all those prejudices in the ballet community, and I still emerged wonderfully trained and found my way to Alvin Ailey where there were familiar faces. — Laurieann Gibson

Racism tears down your insides so that no matter what you achieve, you're not quite up to snuff. — Alvin Ailey