Top 200 Twyla Tharp Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “A young person has to start making decisions for themselves at a much earlier age than an overbearing parent allows one.”

— Twyla Tharp

102. “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

103. “I think that probably the moments of discovery do come from a place that is not totally organized. Order is something that we already know about. Discoveries are in a place we don’t already know about.”

— Twyla Tharp

104. “I’ve survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.”

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

107. “I always, somehow, knew that I was going to dance.”

— Twyla Tharp

108. “The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.”

— Twyla Tharp

109. “There really is nothing I ever had access to that I didn’t appreciate.”

— Twyla Tharp

110. “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

111. “I do everything I know how in a dance.”

— Twyla Tharp

112. “I write. I have read a great deal. I enjoy books. I like the wit of languages. Even French I like. I like to be able to think in different modes. I like to be able to use the language a great deal and carry on rehearsals in French.”

— Twyla Tharp

113. “I’m willing to be regarded as a tyrant to keep my vision intact.”

— Twyla Tharp

114. “With each piece I’ve completed I have worked to make it intact, and each of them has been an equal high. It’s like children. A mother refuses to pick out one as a favorite, and I can’t do any better with the dances.”

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

116. “Dance is the stepchild of the arts.”

— Twyla Tharp

117. “Limits are a secret blessing, and bounty can be a curse.”

— Twyla Tharp

118. “You can keep on chewing gum for ten hours, but after about a minute and a half you’ve got all the good out of it.”

— Twyla Tharp

119. “I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission, and that’s what I set out to do.”

— Twyla Tharp

120. “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

121. “I’m much stronger than most women. When I work with men, or when I’m partnered by men, we can actually go into kinds of movement that haven’t been available before, simply because I’ve strengthened myself as a woman, not because I’ve weakened him.”

— Twyla Tharp

122. “This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider. You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.”

— Twyla Tharp

123. “I understand things that are American, for better or worse.”

— Twyla Tharp

124. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

125. “Our guys have a vision of something bigger.”

— Twyla Tharp

126. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

127. “When I’m in the studio, when I’m warm, when I’m what people call improvising, I feel a very special connection. I feel the most right. I don’t want to become too mystic about this, but things feel as though they’re in the best order at that particular moment.”

— Twyla Tharp

128. “You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.”

— Twyla Tharp

129. “I was fortunate to love men, so I could put them on stage and make roles for them, and move through their bodies in a way that they enjoy doing.”

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

131. “In the end all collaborations are love stories.”

— Twyla Tharp

132. “I have to feel that each thing I’ve learned I can push to another point next time. I’m not very good with repetition. I would rather not work than feel that repetition is the order of the day.”

— Twyla Tharp

133. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

134. “The disasteris not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect – this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they’re not critical to a culture’s existence.”

— Twyla Tharp

135. “I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching.”

— Twyla Tharp

136. “Planning lets you impose order on the chaotic process of making something new, but when it’s taken too far you get locked into a status quo, and creative thinking is about breaking free from the status quo, even from one you made yourself.”

— Twyla Tharp

137. “Men and women are very different athletes, and frankly, I didn’t want to deal with the male potential.”

— Twyla Tharp

138. “Like creativity, collaboration is a habit – and one I encourage you to develop.”

— Twyla Tharp

139. “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

140. “I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That’s a great gift.”

— Twyla Tharp

141. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

142. “A commission is an invitation to fall in love.”

— Twyla Tharp

143. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

144. “That’s what improvising is like for me. There’s no tollbooth between my impulse and my action.”

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

146. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

147. “Living had little use for me other than how it could be funneled into dance.”

— Twyla Tharp

148. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

149. “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.”

— Twyla Tharp

150. “I’ve always had to keep the walls in place, and the only way to do that is to keep yourself constantly occupied. From the time I was 8 years old, until I went to college, I worked. There was no social life.”

— Twyla Tharp