Twyla Tharp Quotes

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Twyla Tharp

Profession : Dancer

Birth : July 1, 1941

What we want from modern dance is courage and audacity.

Twyla Tharp

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.

Twyla Tharp

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

Twyla Tharp

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

Twyla Tharp

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.

Twyla Tharp

I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury.

Twyla Tharp

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

Twyla Tharp

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

Twyla Tharp

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

Twyla Tharp

A commission is an invitation to fall in love.

Twyla Tharp

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.

Twyla Tharp

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

Twyla Tharp

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

Twyla Tharp

Art is an investigation.

Twyla Tharp

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

Twyla Tharp

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.

Twyla Tharp

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

I do at least 75 push-ups a day.

Twyla Tharp

'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.

Twyla Tharp

Dance is just like film in that it allows for thoughts in movement.

Twyla Tharp