Twyla Tharp Quotes

Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you'll learn to do it better.

To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity.

I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.

I never studied with Balanchine, but his work was very important to me.

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

I had always seen myself as a star; I wanted to be a galaxy.

In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

Art is running away without ever leaving home.

Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. . . The one thing that creative souls around the world have in common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills. Art is a vast democracy of habit.

No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.

Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn't have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.

We're a machine and we have to be worked in the same way we have to be fed.

I’m much stronger than most women. Consequently, when I work with men, or when I’m partnered by men... We can actually go into kinds of movement that haven’t been available before, simply because I’ve strengthened myself as a woman, not because I’ve weakened him.

Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. 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. Without the time and effort invested in getting ready to create, you can be hit by a thunderbolt and it'll just leave you stunned.

Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it's important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.

The thing about creativity is, people are going to laugh at it. Get over it.

Life is about moving, it’s about change. And when things stop doing that they’re dead.

When you're in a groove, you're not spinning your wheels; you're moving forward in a straight and narrow path without pauses or hitches. You're unwavering, undeviating, and unparalleled in your purpose. A groove is the best place in the world. Because when you are in it, you have the freedom to explore, where everything you question leads you to new avenues and new routes.

Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind's eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence.

Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.

I don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.

You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work. But that's a moot point. The Zen master cleans his own studio. So should you.

This is the hard part. Knowing and admitting a problem are not the same as solving it. But executing a solution is also the fun part, because the solution save you and gets you moving again.

When I'm in the studio, when I'm warm, when I'm what people call improvising, I feel a very special connection. I feel the most right. I don't want to become too mystic about this, but things feel as though they're in the best order at that particular moment.

My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.

But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it's certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn't working

Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss.

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

Easily acquired. Inexpensive. Perfectly functional. Portable. Identifiable. Disposable. Eternal enough. These are my criteria for the perfect storage system. And I’ve found the answer in the simple file box.

Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.

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.

You're only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft.

I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.

Dance is the stepchild of the arts.

I think that probably the moments of discovery do come from a place that is not totally organized. Order is something that we already know about. Discoveries are in a place we don't already know about.

I've always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work - the rest is style.

The necessity to constantly turn in an excellent performance, to be absolutely wedded to this dedication and this ideal means that as a child you're going to pay for it personally.

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet, that the two disciplines were totally separate, and if you did one, you couldn’t do the other. I’m beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

Just when you arrive at the apex of your skills, it's time to retire. But as it turned out, I decided that since it was the thing that I felt I did best, I owed it to all that be to pursue it.

I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women.

A commission is an invitation to fall in love.

The last two - distractions and fears - are the dangerous ones. They're the habitual demons that invade the launch of any project. No one starts a creative endeavor without a certain amount of fear; the key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you've begun. When I feel that sense of dread, I try to make it as specific as possible.

What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement.

You don't have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.

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.

I'm often asked, 'Where do you get your ideas?' ...It's like asking, 'Where do you find air to breathe?' Ideas are all around you.

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

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.