Misty Copeland Quotes

I actually quit ballet when I was offered a job, an apprenticeship at North Carolina Dance Theater Company, run by John Pierre Bonnefoux and Patricia McBride, who are my idols. Everything sort of went perfectly. I was 16, and I was about to drop out of high school and become a professional ballet dancer.

As soon as I started dancing at 14, I knew I was always going to be a professional dancer.

I know that dancers, especially ballet dancers, can't do it forever.

I wanted to be a professional dancer for a period of time, and I did a lot of dancing and choreography and got paid for it.

You spend your life having lessons, practising and competing as an amateur, and working during the day. As you get to the top end of the amateur field, you try not to work anymore; you earn your living through dancing, maybe by doing a bit of teaching. It's an ongoing life's work.

And I just thought, this is what I want to be. And I knew that dancing would be my chosen profession.

When I came into the industry I started with acting and I did drama during junior high and high school. I fell into dancing as a hobby, but whenever you need work, you try out different things. So I booked a lot of jobs for dancing and it kept rolling and rolling.

The last time I had to make a career decision, I was 17. I could have gone to Ballet Theatre or National Ballet of Canada. There were options. But as I became exposed to the Robbins repertoire, I realized that there was a living genius in the house.

If I was trained as a dancer then I probably would have been a dancer, and I'm not.

So many people think of me as a character on TV, but first and foremost, my passion is teaching dance and creating employable, working dancers.

I wanted to be a professional dancer my whole life.

I am seriously thinking of making dance as my major profession.

I actually came to New York when I was 12 and did ballet school for a little while. I was being groomed to be professional, and a lot of the professors and teachers there were drawn to me and thought that I could become a professional ballerina.

You see, dancers are quite mature people because they start performing so early. They become professionals when they start to take everyday classes.

I have been very lucky to work in so many new ballets, but that is what a dancer's work is.

Dance is a profession with an expiration date for many people.

I didn't grow up on dance class. I was always natural. I've been in the industry since I was eight and I've always had a choreographer since then. But I never really took ballet or anything like that.

Seeing 'Revelations' made me want to be a professional dancer.

I wanted to be a ballet teacher.

I have lots of interests, but it's true that dancing is a very full-time job.

When I was younger, I used to want to be, like, a back-up dancer, and my mom was like, 'Well, you know, you can do that, but you might want to choose another career.'

I've always wanted to be a professional dancer, I'd always wanted to be a ballerina. I trained for 13 years but it never came to be.

Growing up in Niagara Falls, Ontario, I took classes as a young girl and became very serious about ballet, and also performed with a local company, although it wasn't a professional company.

I think the inception of my interest in arts was when I was around 9 or 10 and I started dancing. I was really convinced that I was going to go to New York and be onstage in 'A Chorus Line.'

I've danced since I was 5 and went to the School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center at 7.