Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Arlene Phillips

I'm passionate about dance - about getting people to move and enjoy themselves. But I know dance has incredible physical benefits too.

Saturdays have become like, you know, the Boomtown Rats - 'I Don't Like Mondays.' I don't like Saturdays.

I don't have time to watch TV. The only things I watch are 'Miss Marple' and 'Midsommer Murders.' They are the only things that make me stop.

I am always competing with my body. I am always thinking my body is going to do things it won't do.

I'm short, stocky and have a big bum.

I love getting up in the morning and having to be here and there. It drives me - it's where I get my energy.

I always knew I wanted to dance and when I was eight, I started ballet lessons at a church hall. They all wore pink ballet shoes but I wore green, as they were cheap, and I remember everyone staring at me.

My day job has always been in the theatre.

When I'm offered jobs that I love to do, I think 'well, why not!?'

I think I'm a bit like Tigger, always bounding around. Where it comes from I don't really know; probably too much espresso.

The best way of building up a habit for dance is to introduce it early.

I have always loved theatre and I will always do it.

I don't drink at all. If I'm out I'll have the occasional sip of wine just to be sociable.

Women should have parity with men. End of story.

I don't know what it would be like to stop work; I can't imagine what I would do.

When I am in rehearsal, my tracksuits are carefully placed to disguise parts of my body. I'll think, 'My bum looks big today, so a cardigan will hide it.'

I love swimming, and when I'm choreographing something I'm in the studio dancing all day, every day.

I know many people who have open relationships.

It's hard for anyone to say that they chose to put their parent in a home rather than give up a large part of their own life to care for them, and thinking about the years leading up to my father's death still punishes me.

In a musical, I believe that choreographers are under a great deal of pressure. There's not always the freedom to do what you want to do, because if it ends up being too long the dance breaks are the first thing that will go, because you can't make the story shorter.

When I was 23, I moved to London. It was not an easy thing to do.

There is absolutely nothing you can't do, see, eat or buy in Las Vegas. It is a magical wonderland where everything is possible - especially in the world of showbiz where everything feels so big, bright and spectacular.

I have always had a full-time job. I have always worked full time.

Britannia High' is not set in a high school where people burst into song and dance for no reason. It's a performing arts school, so there is a legitimate reason for them to sing and dance.

I'm a mother - that's who I am totally. But I am also a creator. I manage to fit it all in because I'm very organised. Oh my gosh, I'm so organised, it's unbelievable.

I Iove a dancer who is willing to take risks with their body and go that extra mile to move the audience.

I always wanted children, and it was a dream come true when I discovered I was pregnant with Alana when I was 36.

I am five foot two and a half, and vary between a size 10 and size 12.

I constantly diet. People laugh when I arrive at rehearsal with my box of sliced beetroot and bag of chicory, but if I indulge in a cupcake binge or a large bowl of pasta, it shows.

My father was very proud of everything I did and he watched my career and my growing fame with great interest, but despite my mother dying so early on in my life, my relationship with my father - who was always a very remote figure - was never easy.

In the 1960s everybody knew about Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. No matter what class people belonged to, they were talking about these two young girls who had become mixed up in the Profumo affair. Extraordinary times.

I was probably around 14 or 15 when I became really conscious of those girls who were going on to the Royal Ballet school, and that I was not Royal Ballet school material, not by a long stretch.

Sometimes I'll feel content dieting - if I could only bottle that feeling!

We'd grown up without any money. I mean, everything was a struggle; our lives were a struggle, and dancing changed all of that. Nothing mattered; it was the most important thing in my life.

It took me a long time to understand that there is no amount of wanting and no amount of desire and no amount of hard work which allows you to become a classical ballerina if you're not physically given the gifts.

When day-to-day living became too difficult for him, my father moved to a residential home near me and although he'd never had any sort of dementia test, he gradually became unable either to eat or go to the toilet on his own. Eventually the staff found him too difficult to manage.

When I was teaching I'd go to some schools where no one wanted to dance - when they came into the room it was as though they were being punished. But I'd put on the loudest, the heaviest metal you could imagine and they loved it.

I wanted to dance for as long as I can remember.

If you don't have an academic brain, if you are not interested in maths or science, you are treated as a second-class citizen.

I grew up without any money, but the one thing that we did was sit up in the gods to watch the ballet.

I couldn't have wished for a better life companion. I got extremely lucky when I met Angus.

Life was a struggle financially when I was growing up in Manchester and my father continued the strict upbringing he himself had had, even after our very warm and demonstrative mother died.

Funny enough, apart from when I was at school, I've always gone out with younger men - I was even married briefly to one prior to Angus.

Hot Gossip were revolutionary in some of the dance they did in the 1970s.

I was definitely a tyrant - ask any dancer I've worked with. They were surprised if I was ever nice to them. I had a terrible temper.

Britannia High' is not for three-year-old kids. There are emotional stories in it that are not for little children.

I think dancing always took me to a different place. It was hard and it was a struggle, but it took me to the kind of place I wanted to live in. It wasn't real life.

When my mother died when I was 15, it felt like the end of my dreams of becoming a dancer - I had a sister and a brother and we had to pull together to look after the house and my father.

The Paddy Stone dancers were all upwards of 5ft 6in and stunningly beautiful. I was stocky, tough-looking and 5ft 3in. So I became determined to create my own troupe.

Mirrors are part of my life and an ever-changing source of delight, displeasure or even disaster, depending on which one I am looking in. I look in a magnifying mirror when I pluck my eyebrows in the morning, full-length mirrors every day in rehearsal, and I often nervously bring out a compact to check my make-up.

I've travelled pretty widely and have never taken a violent dislike to anywhere.

My career has just been fantastic - but most importantly, I have an amazing family.

Dad was a barber and Mum looked after the three of us and helped in school doing lunches. I was the middle child with an older brother, Ian, and younger sister, Karen.

My parents were passionate about the ballet. They always played ballet music at home.

The only place I do avoid is Trafalgar Square on New Year's Eve. I saw in the New Year there once - it was the most terrifying experience of my life.

Dancing should be as much a part of our daily routine as brushing our teeth.

I think when you're doing a musical, you have to be attuned to the director's vision. You're working with a variety of people, singers and dancers, so you have to create movement and dance that is for all abilities. You have to further the story through the dance.

I don't know how my parents ever paid for my dance classes when I was little. We even had to line our shoes with newspaper when there were holes in them because we couldn't afford to get them soled.

Women follow me around. On a British Airways flight, at Liverpool station - everywhere.

TV is a cruel mistress; you can't afford to fail in any way.