Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great.

There's an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter.

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.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.

Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.

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

Art is an investigation.