Twyla Tharp Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

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

Twyla Tharp
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
Living had little use for me other than how it could be funneled into dance.

Twyla Tharp
By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.

Twyla Tharp
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.

Twyla Tharp
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.

Twyla Tharp
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.

Twyla Tharp
There's a paradox in the notion that creativity should be a habit. We think of creativity as a way of keeping everything fresh and new, while habit implies routine and repetition. That paradox intrigues me because it occupies the place where creativity and skill rub up against each other.

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

Twyla Tharp
When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can't simulate in a sedentary position.

Twyla Tharp
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
That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action.

Twyla Tharp
Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.

Twyla Tharp
A tough manager will have realistic quotas for his employees that he keeps to himself and aggressively stretch quotas, anywhere from ten percent higher to a lot more, which he imposes on his staff. If his people miss the stretch numbers but exceed the realistic goals, he's happy. If he's a superb manager, he knows how far they can stretch without breaking.

Twyla Tharp
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
I'm willing to be regarded as a tyrant to keep my vision intact.

Twyla Tharp
The irony of multitasking is that it's exhausting: when you're doing two or three things simultaneously, you use more energy than the sum of energy required to do each task independently. You're also cheating yourself because your're not doing anything excellently. You're compromising your virtuosity. In the words of T. S. Elliot, you're 'distracted from distractions by distractions'.

Twyla Tharp
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.

Twyla Tharp
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
Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.

Twyla Tharp
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
Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember, it's how we interpret it - for ourselves and others.

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

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

Twyla Tharp
Creativity is an act of defiance. You're challenging the status quo. You're questioning accepted truths and principles. You're asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom: Why do I have to obey the rules? Why can't I be different? Why can't I do it my way?

Twyla Tharp