Twyla Tharp quotes:

My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.

I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.

Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology. His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests.

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.

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

I don't hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don't read a lot of literature and not care about language.

To survive, you've got to keep wheedling your way. You can't just sit there and fight against odds when it's not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel - and find a way to keep moving.

The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.

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.

Bum's Rush' is a piece about timing, and everything that's in the piece needs to be with the piece. If people are missing, or marking, or unable to use their voices, the impulses that prompt the action are lost, and its logic crumbles.

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.

When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.

When I say I can see through clothes, sometimes I try to use it as an X-ray vision to look into the dancer and see who this dancer is right now, at this exact moment in time. I live inside them in a way.

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 grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.

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.

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.

What we want from modern dance is courage and audacity.

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.

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.

Nothing is more terrifying to me, really, than the status quo. I'll make mistakes before I keep doing something the same way.

There are very few critics who have historical context or authority.

Dance should not just divide people into audience and performers. Everyone should be a participant, whether going to classes or attending special events or rehearsals.

I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I'm not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to.

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.

I've always believed that a dance evening energizes an audience, that an audience goes out feeling chemically stronger and more optimistic. This is what I understand about dance. And this is an important thing. We need this. Our culture needs it.

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.

Things change all the time, so why do people make such a philosophical to-do that things are constantly in transition?

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.

I see dance as glue for a community.

What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.

We don't need to illustrate music; music illustrates itself.

I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women.

Unfortunately, I think we've probably all had the experience that if we're in a relationship where one of the partners is doing it 'my' way, that relationship is not going to survive.

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.

What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement.

There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn't lie, which words easily can do.

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

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!

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

You either entertain an audience or you don't.

I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.

Dance is the most fundamental of all art forms.

Counterpoint is a component that gives real energy, and it is about optimism.

The ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language.

My mother was a dominant force in my life. She had a very specific idea about education, which was: you should know everything about everything. It was quite simple. There was no exclusivity, and there really was no judgment.

There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.

I do not watch television, never have.

The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body.

When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful.

These days, I think we could all agree that having a just-friend is not a bad thing.

I have not wanted to intimidate audiences. I have not wanted my dancing to be an elitist form. That doesn't mean I haven't wanted it to be excellent.

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 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.

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

The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.

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.

I repeat the wake-up, the workout, the quick shower, the breakfast of three hard-boiled egg whites and a cup of coffee, the hour to make my morning calls and deal with correspondence, the two hours of stretching and working out ideas by myself in the studio ... That's my day, every day. A dancer's life is all about repetition.

I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories. Either something works, or it doesn't.

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'.

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.

Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.

If you only do what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won't fail. You'll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that's failure by erosion

You have to believe there's something at the other side. And you have to have faith in yourself. You have to think that you have the tools to accomplish it.

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.

The formal education that I received made little sense to me.

I have always felt one of the things dance should do - its business being so clearly physical - is challenge the culture's gender stereotypes.

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.

Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.

I would have to challenge the term, modern dance. I don't really use that term in relation to my work. I simply think of it as dancing. I think of it as moving.

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

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

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.

Perfect practice makes perfect.

The notion of the hero as outsider, as alien, is forget it, over, done with. It's not about being against society anymore. It's about standing there, holding something up. It's not pulling away.

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.

I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines.

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

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.

I don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.

Dance is the stepchild of the arts.

In those days, male dancers were a rarer breed than women. as they are still today, A good male dancer, one as strong as we were, was very difficult to come by if you couldn't afford to pay them.

I do at least 75 push-ups a day.

Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language.

The content and thematic materials of dance is, of itself, like boxing. You play tennis and baseball. But boxing is not a sport you play: you stand up and do it.

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.

In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.

I was valedictorian. Did I enjoy going to school? I hated it. It wasn't a choice on my part, it was expected.

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.

In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there's not the desperate urgency of when you're on a clock.

Work is work; wherever I'm working, I do the best I can. If the actual dollars come from investors as opposed to taxpayers and patrons, what's the difference?

It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they'll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them.

You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.

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.

If I didn't believe in myself as a dancer, I wouldn't choreograph.

My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.

My dancers expect me to deliver because my choreography represents their livelihood.

I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.

Schubert had arguably the same melodic gift as Mozart, but even less support. He didn't have the early exposure, never got to travel anywhere, and yet generated and amassed a body of work that grew and developed and is very profound.

When I look at the people who are the guiding figures in modern dance, I think, 'This does not look to me like the way I want to spend my days.'

This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age.

I often say that in making dances I can make a world where I think things are done morally, done democratically, done honestly.

My father always said, 'I don't care if you're a ditch digger, as long as you're the best ditch digger in the world.'

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.

I've always felt compelled to explore range, because, as far as I know, we're only here once. So let's see how much we can encompass.

People often say to me, 'I don't know anything about dance.' I say, 'Stop. You got up this morning, and you're walking. You are an expert.'

I had always seen myself as a star; I wanted to be a galaxy.

I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That's a great gift.

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.

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?'

Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere.

I find that dancers are only well trained in ballet these days.

I realize that dancers have worked long and hard for standards. However, on occasion, I think that it's good to examine one's heart and ask why are we dancing.

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.

A commission is an invitation to fall in love.