Twyla Tharp Quotes

I have not wanted to intimidate audiences. I have not wanted my dancing to be an elitist form. That doesn't mean I haven't wanted it to be excellent.

In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that's habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.

I'm a known reader. That's what I do with my time.

You don't get into the mood to create – it's discipline.

The more you fail in private, the less you will fail in public.

A dancer's life is all about repetition.

I was fortunate to love men, so I could put them on stage and make roles for them, and move through their bodies in a way that they enjoy doing...

Perfect practice makes perfect.

Dancers are allowed, indeed encouraged, to remain children forever.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.

I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines.

Failing, and learning from it, is necessary. Unil you've done it, you're missing an important piece of your creative arsenal.

I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.

Men and women are very different athletes, and frankly, I didn't want to deal with the male potential.

I've always had to keep the walls in place, and the only way to do that is to keep yourself constantly occupied... From the time I was 8 years old, until I went to college, I worked... There was no social life.

I have always felt one of the things dance should do - its business being so clearly physical - is challenge the culture's gender stereotypes.

Don’t sign on for more problems than you must. Resist the temptation to involve yourself in other people’s zones of expertise and responsibility. Monitor troublesome situations if you need to, but don’t insert yourself unless you’re running out of time and a solution is nowhere in sight. In short, stifle your inner control freak.

I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.

In the end all collaborations are love stories.

The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That's it in a nutshell ... In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.

I do believe that when dancing is right, the movement possesses a logic common to us all.

I can't emphasize this idea enough. Getting involved with your collaborator's problems almost always distracts you from your own. That can be tempting. That can be a relief. But it usually leads to disaster.

The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.

I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.

I always, somehow, knew that I was going to dance.

I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury.

Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.

The way I enjoyed spending time most was dancing. That's from the time I was a very small child, When I was 4 or 5 years old, I remember already having a regime. It was the way I always identified myself.

That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action.

I think of music as fuel, its spectrum of energy governed by tempi, volume, and heart.

Without the little ideas, there are no big ideas.

I don't believe in rushing and saying this is done and over with. That form of rebellion doesn't make sense to me. I've always attempted to familiarize myself with the traditions, and consider that a responsibility of the artist.

We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.

You can keep on chewing gum for ten hours, but after about a minute and a half you've got all the good out of it.

If you only do what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won't fail. You'll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that's failure by erosion

Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it's one place you can process them.

I also had a will that let me eliminate everything that stood in the way of my becoming the best dancer I could be. By a gradual process... (I) had invested every bit of my dreams, my hopes, my energies in defining myself as a dancer.

I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories. Either something works, or it doesn't.

Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember , it's how we interpret it - for ourselves and others.

When it all comes together, a creative life has the nourishing power we normally associate with food, love and faith.

The formal education that I received made little sense to me.

You have to believe there's something at the other side. And you have to have faith in yourself. You have to think that you have the tools to accomplish it.

In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there's not the desperate urgency of when you're on a clock.

In those days, male dancers were a rarer breed than women. as they are still today, A good male dancer, one as strong as we were, was very difficult to come by if you couldn't afford to pay them.

I was interested in becoming a show dancer, for which I tried, but I'm not tall enough.