“Fred taught me a step because I said I can't let this experience be over without my learning something. He taught me the most wonderful Fred Astaire-like step, with an umbrella. It was a complete throwaway; it was almost invisible. It was in the way he walked. As he moved along, he bounced the umbrella on the floor to the beat and then he grabbed it. It was effortless and invisible. As a matter of fact, a few years later I was photographing Gene Kelly and told him that Fred Astaire had taught me this trick with an umbrella. And Kelly said, "Oh I'll teach you one," and he did, and the two tricks with the umbrella in some way define the difference between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and, in my view, demonstrate who is the greater of the two artists. With Gene Kelly, he threw the umbrella way up into the air, and then he moved to catch it, very slowly, grabbing it behind his back. It was a big, grandstand play, about nothing.”

Irving Berlin, quoted in Puttin' on the Ritz, BBC Programme Acquisition, 1999.

On pop groups like N'Sync, as quoted in interview in TV Guide (1 November 2001)

Jerome Robbins in Heeley, David, producer and director. Fred Astaire: Puttin' on his Top Hat and Fred Astaire: Change Partners and Dance (two television programs written by John L. Miller), PBS, March 1980. (M).

Kirk Douglas in Douglas, Kirk. Let's Face It. Wiley, 2007. ISBN 9780470084694, p. 26.

Gene Kelly quoted in Shipman, David. The Great Movie Stars, The Golden Years. Crown Publishers, New York. 1970. pp. 25-29 as referenced in Billman, Larry: Fred Astaire - A Bio-bibliography, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1997. ISBN 0-313-29010-5 p. 351.

Oscar Levant in Levant, Oscar. The Memoirs of an Amnesiac. New York: Putnam, 1965. (M).

Alan Jay Lerner in Lerner, Alan Jay. On the Street Where I Live. New York: Norton, 1978. p. 89. (M).

Reported by Dick Richards in "Ginger: Salute to a Star", quoting Rogers from Francis Wyndham's story about Ginger Rogers, in London's "Sunday Times Magazine".