Daily Inspiration Quote by Deborah Bull

The line lands with the breezy understatement of someone who knows how romanticized her work can look from the outside. Deborah Bull starts by nodding to a familiar modern desire - to be multi-hyphenate, curious, various. "Lots of interests" signals a whole person, not a monastic artist sealed inside a studio. Then she pivots: "but it's true" is a tiny, disarming oath. She is not bragging; she is correcting the record.

Calling dancing "a very full-time job" does two things at once. It drags ballet down from the realm of pure inspiration and plants it in the unglamorous reality of labor: schedules, repetition, injuries, maintenance. At the same time, the phrase understates how consuming that labor is. Dance isn't just hours on a clock; it colonizes the body. Your instrument is also your identity, your health plan, your aging timeline. "Full-time" becomes code for the relentless bargain dancers make: everything else can exist, but it has to fit around the body's demands.

In context, coming from a prominent British ballerina who later became a cultural administrator and public intellectual, the quote also reads like an early thesis for her second act. She acknowledges the breadth of her interests while explaining why the stage years require narrow focus. The subtext is respect for the craft and a quiet warning about the costs of excellence - delivered with a dancer's economy and control.