Top 40 Fred Astaire Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Do it big, do it right and do it with style.”

— Fred Astaire

Featured in: Enjoy Life Quotes, Dance Quotes

2. “If your gonna go down, go down swinging!”

— Fred Astaire

3. “Chance is the fool’s name for Fate.”

— Fred Astaire

4. “For ballroom dancing, remember that your partners have their own distinctive styles also. Cultivate flexibility. Be able to adapt your style to that of your partner. In doing so, you are not surrendering your individuality, but blending it with that of your partner.”

— Fred Astaire

5. “Some people seem to think that good dancers are born, but all the good dancers I have known are taught or trained...”

— Fred Astaire

6. “If we followed our own advice, we’d be successful.”

— Fred Astaire

7. “It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable.”

— Fred Astaire

8. “If it doesn’t look easy it is that we have not tried hard enough yet.”

— Fred Astaire

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

— Fred Astaire

10. “In dealing with a girl or a horse, one lets nature take its course.”

— Fred Astaire

11. “And that love that wrinkles your nose touches my foolish heart.”

— Fred Astaire

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

— Fred Astaire

13. “Be yourself-but don’t be conspicuous.”

— Fred Astaire

14. “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”

— Fred Astaire

15. “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 artistic” attitude. I know that artistry just happens.”

— Fred Astaire

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

— Fred Astaire

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

— Fred Astaire

18. “When you’re experimenting you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, and you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion.”

— Fred Astaire

19. “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 I finish with a project, I say: “All right, that’s that. What’s next?””

— Fred Astaire

20. “Why didn’t you tell me i was in love with you?”

— Fred Astaire

21. “I often take a brand-new suit or hat and throw it up against the wall a few times to get that stiff, square newness out of it.”

— Fred Astaire

22. “People think I was born in top hat and tails.”

— Fred Astaire

23. “Dancing is a sweat job.”

— Fred Astaire

24. “I’m just a hoofer with a spare set of tails.”

— Fred Astaire

25. “Oh, God! That boy moves in a very exceptional way. That’s the greatest dancer of the century.”

— Fred Astaire

26. “This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn’t want to be tracked. It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable.”

— Fred Astaire

27. “I am bit 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.”

— Fred Astaire

28. “If the dance is right, there shouldn’t be a single superfluous movement.”

— Fred Astaire

29. “I don’t like top hats, white ties, and tails.”

— Fred Astaire

30. “What counts more than luck is determination and perseverance. If the talent is there, it will come through. Don’t be too impatient. Stick at it. That’s my advice. You have to plug away, keep thinking up new ideas. If one doesn’t work, try another.”

— Fred Astaire

31. “I just told my agent to forget all other projects for me. I was waiting for Audrey Hepburn. She asked for me, and I was ready. This could be the last and only opportunity I’d have to work with the great and lovely Audrey Hepburn and I was not missing it. Period.”

— Fred Astaire

32. “When you have a Dancing partner, there’s always gonna be a moment where the girl’s gonna cry, Ginger didn’t do that. But, most every other girl I’ve worked with have cried because they said “aah, I can’t do it” and I have to go “Yes, you can, Shut up!” and they do do it.”

— Fred Astaire

33. “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.”

— Fred Astaire

34. “I don’t remember anybody ever pointing me out as a dancing prodigy, but I played a not bad second base.”

— Fred Astaire

35. “I had some ballet training but didn’t like it. It was like a game to me.”

— Fred Astaire

36. “It’s nice that all the composers have said that nobody interprets a lyric like Fred Astaire. But when it comes to selling records I was never worth anything particularly except as a collector’s item.”

— Fred Astaire

37. “I have never had anything that I can remember in the business – and that includes all the movies and the stage shows and everything – that I didn’t enjoy. I didn’t like some of the small-time vaudeville, because we weren’t going on and getting better. Aside from that, I didn’t dislike anything.”

— Fred Astaire

38. “The unpadded shoulders, the three-buttoned long and boxy coat, the too-short, thin pants, and the thin ties with striped buttoned shirts in dark colors-well, I suppose this may go very well with some personalities but it’s not for me. To me, all such look like TV producers. Maybe they want to.”

— Fred Astaire

39. “Slippery stages were the terror of my life.”

— Fred Astaire

40. “We attend to his later performances as a dramatic actor with respect, but watching the nondancing, nonsinging Astaire is like watching a grounded skylark.”

— Fred Astaire

41. “I just put my feet in the ground and move them around.”

— Fred Astaire