Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.

I've always thought my creative life began the moment my mother called me Twyla.

A dancer's life is all about repetition.

I always find that the best collaborations are when you work with people that know what they're doing, and you leave them alone to do it.

Usually kids who are talented have the brashness to think they can do anything, but they don't often get the chance to see how close they can come.

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.

It takes skill to bring something you've imagined into the world: to use words to create believable lives, to select the colors and textures of paint to represent a haystack at sunset, to combine ingredients to make a flavorful dish. No one is born with that skill. It is developed through exercise, through repitition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time. . . . If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.