Top 200 Twyla Tharp Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Perfect practice makes perfect.”

— Twyla Tharp

2. “Creativity is an act of defiance.”

— Twyla Tharp

Featured in: Creativity Quotes

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

7. “Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.”

— Twyla Tharp

8. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

9. “To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity.”

— Twyla Tharp

10. “Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you’ll learn to do it better.”

— Twyla Tharp

11. “No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that’s both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.”

— Twyla Tharp

12. “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.”

— Twyla Tharp

13. “I don’t think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.”

— Twyla Tharp

14. “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

15. “You double your intensity with skill.”

— Twyla Tharp

16. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

18. “When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can’t simulate in a sedentary position.”

— Twyla Tharp

19. “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

20. “Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.”

— Twyla Tharp

21. “The more you know, the better you can imagine.”

— Twyla Tharp

22. “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

23. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

24. “Without the little ideas, there are no big ideas.”

— Twyla Tharp

25. “When you’re in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.”

— Twyla Tharp

26. “Concentrate: you can’t have it all.”

— Twyla Tharp

27. “When creativity has become your habit; when you’ve learned to manage time, resources, expectations, and the demands of others; when you understand the value and place of validation, continuity, and purity of purpose, then you’re on the way to an artist’s ultimate goal; the achievement of mastery.”

— Twyla Tharp

28. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

31. “When it all comes together, a creative life has the nourishing power we normally associate with food, love and faith.”

— Twyla Tharp

32. “More often than not I’ve found, a rut is a consequence of sticking to tried and tested methods that don’t take into account how you or the world has changed.”

— Twyla Tharp

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Venturing out of your comfort zone may be dangerous, yet do it anyways because our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.”

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

37. “You don’t get into the mood to create – it’s discipline.”

— Twyla Tharp

38. “Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.”

— Twyla Tharp

39. “In creative endeavors luck is a skill.”

— Twyla Tharp

40. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

42. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

45. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

46. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

48. “If you’re speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty – and perhaps it’s best approached as the art of constant maintenance.”

— Twyla Tharp

49. “Creativity requires quite a lot of faith – not just in yourself but also in the knowledge that you have the right to proceed, even when you may not know exactly what you’re doing.”

— Twyla Tharp

50. “In the future, I will make certain that I commit to projects so there’s enough breathing space for me to have an emotional life.”

— Twyla Tharp