[My father] used to say all the time, “You’re in a struggle, but if you get in a fight and lose your temper, you’ll lose the fight. So don’t get mad, get smart.”

I thought often during my years in the White House of an admonition that we received in our small school in Plains, Georgia, from a beloved teacher, Miss Julia Coleman. She often said: "We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles."

One person that is my role model is my father. ... He’s a man who taught me something very important. And that was — give back to society what you’ve taken out.

My mother used to say to me a thing which, when I look back on it, wasn’t terribly logical. — and I had a pretty hearty appetite, but when I had had a large meal put in front of me, and even I couldn’t get through it, she would say, “Edmund, remember the starving millions in Asia.” Now what possible use my consuming it would do for the starving millions in Asia, I don’t really know, but the fact remains that I was brought up to think about the starving millions in Asia. That meant I had to clean my plate up and not waste it. Later on, I got more involved with the starving millions in Asia, perhaps in a slightly more practical way: helping some of them with schooling and hospitaling and even in agriculture.

That’s an easy question. It was, of course, George Balanchine. He came from Russia via Europe and settled in America in 1933. He started a little company which was not very successful, so he had to start over and over again. Ultimately, he founded the New York City Ballet. I happened to be born at the right time, came to the right place, and had the fortune to audition for him, and work with him, because he is the genius of the century of ballet. I learned how to dance with him.

No, never. Strangely enough, being such a tomboy, and being so—as my mother says—spoiled as a child, once I started dancing and in a way growing up, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was when I really had no reason to be as a child. When you work, it’s a laboratory. The dance studio, when we were working together, was the place where you experiment. I’m not intimidated by failure or making a mistake, because you learn from those situations. You don’t learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don’t really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time. When you fail, maybe you failed in that particular instance, but you have discovered something else. A lot of the ballets that we went on to do were built around mistakes that we had made in the classroom. So you never throw anything out. Rebelling takes up energy. As a dancer, you don’t have that kind of energy to throw away.

By the time I admitted that I needed a hip operation, I had denied it for so long that it was a breakthrough to suddenly say, “I need this.” I knew I would probably never dance again, but I had no choice. By that time, I just wanted to be normal. I wanted to walk down the street without limping. I couldn’t tie my shoes. I couldn’t put slacks on. I was the farthest thing from a person who ever could dance and do all those extremely incredible extensions and contortions that we do.

Well, I’ve had injuries, but I’d always get out on stage because I think the body is a wonderful thing, and you have to treat it with respect. We haven’t even reached our potential for what we can do as human beings. I went through a period where I had hip trouble. I thought it was just a typical pulled muscle, so I used liniment, and warmed up more than I thought was necessary, all the things we learn to do when you have a typical dance-related injury or sore muscle. Over the months, it didn’t go away. In fact, it got worse. Eventually I realized that I had a very serious problem, and it was the first time that dance had let me down. What had been my salvation and my security with my body was abandoning me. This was emotionally and physically devastating.