Twyla Tharp - Push Comes to Shove (1992)

14 Sourced Quotes

View all Twyla Tharp Quotes
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
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
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
I think of music as fuel, its spectrum of energy governed by tempi, volume, and heart.

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

Twyla Tharp
Dancers are allowed, indeed encouraged, to remain children forever.

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
The art of these Fifties movies was in sustaining forever the moment before sex.

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

Twyla Tharp
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