Quotes by Fred Astaire

“The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.”

“Old age is like everything else to make a success of it you got to start young.”

“I am not sending messages with my feet. All I ever wanted was not to come up empty. I did it for the dough and the old applause.”

“Old age is like everything else to make a success of it you got to start young.”

“I have no desire to prove anything by it. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance.”

“When working on my choreography I am not always receptive to outside suggestions or opinions. I believe that if you have something in mind in the way of a creation, such as a new dance, a sequence,...”

“But I do nothing that I don't like, such as inventing up to the arty or down to the corny. I happen to relish a certain type of corn. What I think is the really dangerous approach is the let's be a...”

“I don't make love by kissing, I make love by dancing.”

“Either the camera will dance, or I will.”

“There comes a day when people begin to say, 'Why doesn't that old duffer retire?' I want to get out while they're still saying Astaire is a hell of a dancer.”

“A four wood I hit on the 13th hole at Bel Air Country Club in June of 1945. It landed right on the green and rolled into the cup for a hole in one.”

“What's all this talk about me being teamed with Ginger Rogers? I will not have it Leland--I did not go into pictures to be teamed with her or anyone else, and if that is the program in mind for me ...”

“I have had to do most of my choreography. I would say most of it, with help from various choreographers I have worked with.”

“Oh, there's no such thing as my favorite performance. I can't sit here today and look back, and say, Top Hat was better than Easter Parade or any of the others. I just don't look back, period. When...”

“He lacks confidence to the most enormous degree of all the people in the world. He will not even go to see his rushes. He’ll stay out in the alley and pace up and down and worry and collar you when...”

“I remember when I was doing a film with Fred Astaire, it was nothing for him to work three or four days on two bars of music. One evening in the dark grey hours of dusk, I was walking across the de...”

“He is terribly rare. He is like Bach, who in his time had a great concentration of ability, essence, knowledge, a spread of music. Astaire has that same concentration of genius; there is so much of...”

“He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times... you see a little bit of Astaire in everybody's dancing--a pause here, a move there. It was all Astaire's orig...”

“What do dancers think of Fred Astaire? It's no secret. We hate him. He gives us a complex because he's too perfect. His perfection is an absurdity. It's too hard to face.”

“He's a genius...a classical dancer like I never saw in my life.”