Top 200 Twyla Tharp Quotes (2025 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’ve survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.”

— Twyla Tharp

103. “I’m a known reader. That’s what I do with my time.”

— Twyla Tharp

104. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

114. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

125. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

133. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

135. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

137. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

139. “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

140. “As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.”

— Twyla Tharp

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

— Twyla Tharp

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp

149. “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

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

— Twyla Tharp