"...perhaps there is something similar about making dances and writing descriptions. There are so many words in a writer's vocabulary and many combinations are possible. You weigh words and use one or another, depending on what you are trying to express. And that is the way it is with movement, too: you try to weigh things, to see the importance of this gesture and that one - placed and measured in time, of course. Time - music and silences - makes gesture mean something. It's dancing presented in a certain way. To make every step look different by the way it is presented. A writer chooses a word. I choose a gesture. Economy is the point, learning what we can do without, reducing to essentials."
"Ballets have short lives. Compared to books, paintings, to plays and pieces of music, they are ephemeral indeed. The ballet audience, like every audience in the theatre, always wants something new. When a ballet is a success, it sometimes remains for three or four years, perhaps ten, seldom more."
- George Balanchine, Introduction to Balanchine's New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets (Francis Mason ed.)
