John Guare Quotes

The New York City Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that.

I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money?

Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.

I think of the New York City Ballet as the Yankees without George Steinbrenner.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

How much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes; I am all random.

I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.

It's amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.

You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy.

And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.

We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.

All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs.

The rich live hand-to-mouth too-just on a higher level.

What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.

Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism.

Feydeau's one rule of playwriting:
Character A: My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B.
Knock Knock.
Enter Character B.

The only riots were the people trying to get tickets.

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

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.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

I think that every year that the New York City Ballet is alive is worthy of celebration. Because otherwise the terrible thing is just that we take it for granted.

You can't kind of take away, you either do or you don't. If you kind of take away something you're a failure.

And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.

Oh, I never use a seat belt. I don't believe in gravity.

I don't think about taking a risk. I think about how far can I go. How can I make myself. What are the risks I must create.

The Atlantic Ocean was something then.

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.

I only do business with the people I do business with. The people I do business with find out I do business with the people I don't do business with ... I can't do business with you.