Top 100 Quotes About Twyla Tharp
#1. Twyla Tharp is not going to take orders from anyone, not even Mozart!
Robert Gottlieb
#2. Has there ever been a dance career with more ups and downs than Twyla Tharp's? Or with more varied ambitions? Or larger ambition?
Robert Gottlieb
#3. Twyla Tharp set her sights on ballet, and ballet, hungry for major talent, succumbed.
Robert Gottlieb
#4. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art. - TWYLA THARP
Daniel H. Pink
#5. I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn't care, I was free.
Madonna Ciccone
#6. Twyla Tharp put it together from the material I wrote and recorded over my whole career. I thought it was pretty good, but how objective could I be?
Billy Joel
#7. I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.
Twyla Tharp
#8. 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
#9. I look for dancers who have all the technique in the world. But they must be dancers who are open-minded, who are willing to forget that they know anything. They also have to be gorgeous; they must have a clear image of themselves and strong personalities.
Twyla Tharp
#10. 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
#11. This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age.
Twyla Tharp
#12. The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing.
Twyla Tharp
#13. Creativity is not just for artists. It's for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.
Twyla Tharp
#14. I always tell students that you've got to be practical. You do not need a dream. You need a purpose, something you can wake up to in the morning when the dream is dissipated.
Twyla Tharp
#15. I thought I had to make an impact on history. I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission. Posterity deals with us however it sees fit. But I gave it 20 years of my best shot.
Twyla Tharp
#16. 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
#17. It was not until I had graduated from college that I made a professional commitment to it. Frankly, I didn't think it wise. I was my own interior parental force, and it's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.
Twyla Tharp
#18. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#19. In the end all collaborations are love stories.
Twyla Tharp
#20. I can't emphasize this idea enough. Getting involved with your collaborator's problems almost always distracts you from your own. That can be tempting. That can be a relief. But it usually leads to disaster.
Twyla Tharp
#21. I am magnetically drawn to images, whether they're paintings, photographs, film, or video. They are all lodestones of inspiration to me.
Twyla Tharp
#22. When dancing is right, the movement possesss a logic common to us all, an inevitability that takes it beyond the personal and egocentric and makes of it classical art.
Twyla Tharp
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The more you know, the better you can imagine.
Twyla Tharp
#26. Energy and time are finite resources; conserving them is very important.
Twyla Tharp
#27. Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.
Twyla Tharp
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.
Twyla Tharp
#31. Things change all the time, so why do people make such a philosophical to-do that things are constantly in transition?
Twyla Tharp
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit.
Twyla Tharp
#35. Dancers are allowed, indeed encouraged, to remain children forever ...
Twyla Tharp
#36. The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.
Twyla Tharp
#37. 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
#38. Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.
Twyla Tharp
#39. There is a moral dimension, for me, in anything that's any good.
Twyla Tharp
#40. When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.
Twyla Tharp
#41. My dancers expect me to deliver because my choreography represents their livelihood.
Twyla Tharp
#42. Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.
Twyla Tharp
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that.
Twyla Tharp
#47. It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.
Twyla Tharp
#48. The more you fail in private, the less you will fail in public.
Twyla Tharp
#49. Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.
Twyla Tharp
#50. It's very difficult for me to do fund raising for my own organization if I'm working for other companies because sponsors will say, 'Well, hey, man, if she's doing a ballet for Ballet Theatre, we'll give money to Ballet Theatre.'
Twyla Tharp
#51. Zoe refers to the aggregate. Bios accommodates the notion of death, that each life has a beginning, middle, and end, that each life contains a story. Zoe, wrote Kerenyi, "does not admit of the experience of its own destruction: it is experienced without end, as infinite life.
Twyla Tharp
#52. A dancer's life is all about repetition.
Twyla Tharp
#53. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.
Twyla Tharp
#54. The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
Twyla Tharp
#55. 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
#56. We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.
Twyla Tharp
#58. Let me put it this way: I would like to direct a successful film. An unsuccessful film I would not like to direct. Films are very difficult.
Twyla Tharp
#59. After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves.
Twyla Tharp
#60. I am fairly concise when I work and I work quickly because I think work is done better in a high gear than done our in a gear when everyone's exhausted. Get focused, do it!
Twyla Tharp
#61. Our guys have a vision of something bigger.
Twyla Tharp
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Men and women are very different athletes, and frankly, I didn't want to deal with the male potential.
Twyla Tharp
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.
Twyla Tharp
#70. 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
#71. My favorite audience is everybody. I worked in a drive-in theater from the time I was 8 years old until I went to college, and I'm accustomed to everybody can buy a ticket and everybody should be taken into account.
Twyla Tharp
#72. Too much planning implies you've got it all under control. That's boring, unrealistic, and dangerous.
Twyla Tharp
#73. By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.
Twyla Tharp
#74. 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
#75. 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.
Twyla Tharp
#76. I often say that in making dances I can make a world where I think things are done morally, done democratically, done honestly.
Twyla Tharp
#77. I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That's a great gift.
Twyla Tharp
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. I do believe that when dancing is right, the movement possesses a logic common to us all.
Twyla Tharp
#81. I do everything I know how in a dance.
Twyla Tharp
#82. I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.
Twyla Tharp
#83. You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas ... when you actually do something physical.
Twyla Tharp
#84. 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
#85. I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.
Twyla Tharp
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I've always thought my creative life began the moment my mother called me Twyla.
Twyla Tharp
#89. It's always a problem, getting the curtain in at the end of the first act; having enough of a resolve so that you can bring the curtain in and then opening the show a second time is a little bizarre as a tradition. I've always preferred to go straight through.
Twyla Tharp
#90. 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
#91. 'The Creative Habit' is basically about how you work alone, how you survive as a solitary artist. 'The Collaborative Habit' is obviously about surviving with other people.
Twyla Tharp
#92. When I started making dances in the '60s, narrative dance was sort of off the radar screen. What was important at the time in the avant-garde was minimalism.
Twyla Tharp
#93. We want our artists to take the mundane materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us.
Twyla Tharp
#94. There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.
Twyla Tharp
#95. 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
#96. There really is nothing I ever had access to that I didn't appreciate.
Twyla Tharp
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
Twyla Tharp
#100. Mastery is an elusive concept. You never know when you achieve it absolutely and it may not help you to feel you've attained it. We can recognize it more readily in others than we can in ourselves. We have to discover our own definition of it.
Twyla Tharp
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