Top 100 Twyla Tharp Quotes
#1. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#2. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#3. The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing.
Twyla Tharp
#4. While most people in the arts think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative ... the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.
Twyla Tharp
#5. One clear difference between art and commercial work is that commercial work is exploitive: the work may be high quality but the intention is to sell product or tickets. Art exists with or without ticket sales.
Twyla Tharp
#6. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#7. Energy and time are finite resources; conserving them is very important.
Twyla Tharp
#8. I think people want very much to simplify their lives enough so that they can control the things that make it possible to sleep at night.
Twyla Tharp
#9. The ultimate point of a piece for me is that it drives the next one. Does it open new doors? That's the success of a piece.
Twyla Tharp
#10. When the time came I would do battle with my mother for the right to sit at the center of my own life.
Twyla Tharp
#11. If you're speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty - and perhaps it's best approached as the art of constant maintenance.
Twyla Tharp
#12. Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit.
Twyla Tharp
#13. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#14. Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.
Twyla Tharp
#15. There is a moral dimension, for me, in anything that's any good.
Twyla Tharp
#16. Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.
Twyla Tharp
#17. A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.
Twyla Tharp
#18. When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, 'You've learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what's the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?'
Twyla Tharp
#19. It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.
Twyla Tharp
#20. A dancer's life is all about repetition.
Twyla Tharp
#21. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.
Twyla Tharp
#22. The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
Twyla Tharp
#23. To make real change, you have to be well anchored - not only in the belief that it can be done, but also in some pretty real ways about who you are and what you can do.
Twyla Tharp
#24. We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.
Twyla Tharp
#26. I learned very early that an audience would relax and look at things differently if they felt they could laugh with you from time to time. There's an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter.
Twyla Tharp
#27. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#28. Everyone has a talent. It's simply a question of good discipline, of the good fortune to have an education that meshes with that talent, and a lot of luck.
Twyla Tharp
#29. Creativity requires quite a lot of faith - not just in yourself but also in the knowledge that you have the right to proceed, even when you may not know exactly what you're doing.
Twyla Tharp
#30. I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.
Twyla Tharp
#31. The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.
Twyla Tharp
#32. I began to discriminate between fear and excitement. The two, though very close, are completely different. Fear is negative excitement, choking your imagination. Real excitement produces an energy that overcomes apprehension and makes you want to close in on your goal.
Twyla Tharp
#33. By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.
Twyla Tharp
#34. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#35. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#36. Nobody likes to see that which they've invested in disappear from the face of the earth before they've even died. This is not cool. We can now see what the landmarks are.
Twyla Tharp
#37. You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas ... when you actually do something physical.
Twyla Tharp
#38. At the ballet classes I took when I first came to New York, I would see great dancers like Cynthia Gregory and Lupe Serrano. I would look at them and study what they could do, and what I couldn't do. And then I'd think maybe they should try what I could do.
Twyla Tharp
#39. I'm much stronger than most women. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#40. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#41. Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart.
Twyla Tharp
#42. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#43. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#44. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#45. Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
Twyla Tharp
#46. 'Bum's Rush' is a piece about timing, and everything that's in the piece needs to be with the piece. If people are missing, or marking, or unable to use their voices, the impulses that prompt the action are lost, and its logic crumbles.
Twyla Tharp
#47. Broadway has some very tight expectations as to what a show is.
Twyla Tharp
#48. When I say I can see through clothes, sometimes I try to use it as an X-ray vision to look into the dancer and see who this dancer is right now, at this exact moment in time. I live inside them in a way.
Twyla Tharp
#49. I realize that dancers have worked long and hard for standards. However, on occasion, I think that it's good to examine one's heart and ask why are we dancing.
Twyla Tharp
#50. To survive, you've got to keep wheedling your way. You can't just sit there and fight against odds when it's not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel - and find a way to keep moving.
Twyla Tharp
#51. Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business.
Twyla Tharp
#52. In those long and sleepless nights when I'm unable to shake my fears sufficiently, I borrow a biblical epigraph from Dostoyevsky's The Demons: I see my fears being cast into the bodies of wild boars and hogs, and I watch them rush to a cliff where they fall to their deaths.
Twyla Tharp
#53. Art is running away without ever leaving home.
Twyla Tharp
#54. Who a dancer is physically feeds into character for me. Always has.
Twyla Tharp
#55. The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body.
Twyla Tharp
#56. Desire is the first thing a modern dancer should have. Skill can be developed. But if you don't have desire as a modern dancer, forget it.
Twyla Tharp
#57. When creativity has become your habit; when you've learned to manage time, resources, expectations, and the demands of others; when you understand the value and place of validation, continuity, and purity of purpose, then you're on the way to an artist's ultimate goal; the achievement of mastery.
Twyla Tharp
#58. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#59. More often than not I've found, a rut is a consequence of sticking to tried and tested methods that don't take into account how you or the world has changed.
Twyla Tharp
#60. A young person has to start making decisions for themselves at a much earlier age than an overbearing parent allows one.
Twyla Tharp
#61. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#62. Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere.
Twyla Tharp
#63. Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box
Twyla Tharp
#64. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#65. Remember this when you're struggling for a big idea. You're much better off scratching for a small one.
Twyla Tharp
#66. There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.
Twyla Tharp
#67. Dance is simply the refinement of human movement - walking, running, and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.
Twyla Tharp
#68. I've always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work - the rest is style.
Twyla Tharp
#69. No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they'll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them.
Twyla Tharp
#70. Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.
Twyla Tharp
#71. Critics should be looked at simply as commentators.
Twyla Tharp
#72. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#73. Milos Forman is a great director, Jim Brooks is a wonderful writer and director.
Twyla Tharp
#74. To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity.
Twyla Tharp
#75. I do not watch television, never have.
Twyla Tharp
#76. You don't get lucky without preparation, and there's no sense in being prepared if you're not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.
Twyla Tharp
#77. I have always felt one of the things dance should do - its business being so clearly physical - is challenge the culture's gender stereotypes.
Twyla Tharp
#78. When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can't simulate in a sedentary position.
Twyla Tharp
#79. I think of music as fuel, its spectrum of energy governed by tempi, volume, and heart.
Twyla Tharp
#80. I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories. Either something works, or it doesn't.
Twyla Tharp
#81. There are very few critics who have historical context or authority.
Twyla Tharp
#82. I was valedictorian. Did I enjoy going to school? I hated it. It wasn't a choice on my part, it was expected.
Twyla Tharp
#83. Living had little use for me other than how it could be funneled into dance.
Twyla Tharp
#84. I'm willing to be regarded as a tyrant to keep my vision intact.
Twyla Tharp
#85. As people who have commitments and obligations, we try to blockade emotions and go on our course towards excellence, and that's a lie. I've definitely paid a price. Everything is an exchange.
Twyla Tharp
#86. Whenever I feel I'm working in a groove it's invariably because I feel I am being the benefactor in the situation rather than the beneficiary. I am sharing my art with others, lending my craft to theirs, interest-free with no IOU.
Twyla Tharp
#87. We don't need to illustrate music; music illustrates itself.
Twyla Tharp
#88. In creative endeavors luck is a skill.
Twyla Tharp
#89. 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
Twyla Tharp
#90. It's vital to establish some rituals-automatic but decisive patterns of behavior-at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way.
Twyla Tharp
#91. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#92. I'm obviously always interested in the dancer who's an athlete and vice versa. I expect dancers to be in condition like an athlete is and to challenge themselves in the same way, to the same physical degree.
Twyla Tharp
#93. I've always felt compelled to explore range, because, as far as I know, we're only here once. So let's see how much we can encompass.
Twyla Tharp
#94. With each piece I've completed I have worked to make it intact, and each of them has been an equal high. It's like children. A mother refuses to pick out one as a favorite, and I can't do any better with the dances.
Twyla Tharp
#95. I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission, and that's what I set out to do.
Twyla Tharp
#96. You only need one good reason to commit to an idea, not four hundred. But if you have four hundred reasons to say yes and one reason to say no, the answer is probably no.
Twyla Tharp
#97. My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.
Twyla Tharp
#98. The notion of the hero as outsider, as alien, is forget it, over, done with. It's not about being against society anymore. It's about standing there, holding something up. It's not pulling away.
Twyla Tharp
#99. We're a machine and we have to be worked in the same way we have to be fed.
Twyla Tharp
#100. The thing about creativity is, people are going to laugh at it. Get over it.
Twyla Tharp
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