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

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

I had received my first establishment grants in response to applications filed the year before. To the pages of baffling forms I had simply attached a handwritten note saying, 'I make dances, not applications. Send the money. Love, Twyla.

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

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

There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn't lie, which words easily can do.

I walk into a large white room. It's a dance studio in midtown Manhattan. The room is clean, virtually spotless if you don’t count the thousands of skid marks and footprints left there by dancers rehearsing. Other than the mirrors, the boom box, the skid marks, and me, the room is empty.