Best 194 quotes of Twyla Tharp on MyQuotes

A commission is an invitation to fall in love.

A dancer's life is all about repetition.

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. The most productive ones get started early in the morning, when the world is quiet, the phones aren't ringing, and their minds are rested, alert, and not yet polluted by other people's words.

Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that.

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet, that the two disciplines were totally separate, and if you did one, you couldn’t do the other. I’m beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

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.

Art is an investigation.

Art is running away without ever leaving home.

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

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.

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.

A young person has to start making decisions for themselves at a much earlier age than an overbearing parent allows one.

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

But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it's certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn't working

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

Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. . . The one thing that creative souls around the world have in common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills.  Art is a vast democracy of habit.

Dancing is like bank robbery, it takes split-second timing.

Dance is the stepchild of the arts.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That's it in a nutshell ... In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

Creativity is an act of defiance.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.

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.

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.

Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.

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.

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

Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent. Mozart was hardly some naive prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let music flow from his fingertips. It's a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss.

Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you'll learn to do it better.

Don’t sign on for more problems than you must. Resist the temptation to involve yourself in other people’s zones of expertise and responsibility. Monitor troublesome situations if you need to, but don’t insert yourself unless you’re running out of time and a solution is nowhere in sight. In short, stifle your inner control freak.

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.

Energy and time are finite resources; conserving them is very important.

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.

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.

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.

Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn't have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.

Failing, and learning from it, is necessary. Unil you've done it, you're missing an important piece of your creative arsenal.

Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you. If you're generous to someone, if you do something to help him out, you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It's like inviting yourself into a community of good fortune.

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.

I always find that the best collaborations are when you work with people that know what they're doing, and you leave them alone to do it.

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!

I began ear training when I was about six months old. My mother was a concert pianist, and she started all of her children with music before they were a year old. Then she began to see that I had a musical gift...

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.

I cannot overstate how much a generous spirit contributes to good luck. Look at the luckiest people around you, the ones you envy, the ones who seem to have destiny falling habitually into their laps. If they're anything like the fortunate people I know, they're prepared, they're always working at their craft, they're alert, they involve their friends in their work, and they tend to make others feel lucky to be around them.

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.

I do believe that when dancing is right, the movement possesses a logic common to us all.

I do everything I know how in a dance.

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.

I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart.

I don't think politicians should be allowed into power who are not familiar with their bodies, because that's where our bottom line is. And I know that they would make totally different decisions if they felt responsible simply for their own bodies.