Aging & Wisdom Quote by Deborah Bull

There is a polite ruthlessness to Deborah Bull's line: it sounds like friendly advice, but it carries the cold timetable of a body-driven art form. "But" does a lot of work here, quietly rebutting the romantic idea that passion alone can late-bloom its way into ballet. She frames dancing not as self-expression first, but as a skill stack you either build early or you don't build at all.

The phrase "start young" is less nostalgia than biology. Bull is pointing at bone structure, flexibility, turnout, coordination, and the nervous system's window for encoding complex movement until it feels instinctive. In dance, "necessary" isn't motivational language; it's a gate. The subtext is that access and opportunity are front-loaded: the kids who can train early are often the kids with money, proximity to schools, parents with time, and bodies that aren't already being asked to work other jobs. A seemingly neutral requirement becomes a sorting mechanism.

Coming from Bull, a major British ballerina who lived inside elite institutions, the sentence also reads as insider realism rather than elitist sneer. She's not defending the system so much as naming its terms. That honesty lands because it clashes with the broader culture's comforting myth that talent will out. Bull reminds us that in certain fields, greatness is not just chosen; it's scheduled.