My name is not unfamiliar to anybody in the dance community. I’m talking the upper echelon of dance studios.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.

For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

I don’t like two stories. I like one story. I never grew up with stairs. I like to stick to what I know.

I meet young people who know me and are familiar with my stuff. They know the package. They might have cherry-picked five or six key tunes. That’s how it seems to work. I sometimes wonder if they realise they are not getting the whole context.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.