Twyla Tharp Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

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
Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit.

Twyla Tharp
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.

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
There are as many forms of memory as there are ways of perceiving, and every one of them is worth mining for inspiration.

Twyla Tharp
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.

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

Twyla Tharp
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
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.

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
Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.

Twyla Tharp
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
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
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
My greatest fear in working is always the end. Lately I have taken to tricking myself into finishing by leaving a hole in the middle somewhere, then stitching the two pieces together — the Union Pacific approach.

Twyla Tharp
There are so few people who can really take hold of art and sort of eat and chew it up. Somehow it's got to be held special, sacred in a corner, and if you don't do the same thing with it, if you're not equally reverential, serious, and pompous about it, well, then you're not a great artist. Who needs that?

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

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
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
A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they start their creative day.

Twyla Tharp
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
The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightening bold of inspiration, maybe more. And this routine is available to everyone.

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 think of music as fuel, its spectrum of energy governed by tempi, volume, and heart.

Twyla Tharp
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
When dancing is right, the movement possesses a logic common to us all, an inevitability that takes it beyond the personal and egocentric and makes of it classical art.

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

Twyla Tharp
If you want to create art, you'd best have a deep belief in yourself and no ulterior motives.

Twyla Tharp
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.

Twyla Tharp