Quotes from Twyla Tharp

Dance is a tough life (and a tougher way to make a living). Choreography is even more brutal because there is no way to carry our history forward. Our creations disappear the moment we finish performing them. It's tough to preserve a legacy, create a history for yourself and others. But I put all that aside and pursued my gut instinct anyway. I became my own rebellion. Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice.

We want our artists to take the mundane materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us.

Another thing about knowing who you are is that you know what you should not be doing, which can save you a lot of heartaches and false starts if you catch it early on.

A dancer's life is all about repetition.

The real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.

Like creativity, collaboration is a habit—and one I encourage you to develop.

Movement stimulates our brains in ways we don't appreciate

Michelangelo is celebrated for the Sistine Chapel; in fact, he supervised a dozen unacknowledged assistants. Even one of the greatest composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, chose to deflect credit for his compositions, writing at the bottom of each of his pieces "SDG," for Soli Deo Gloria—to God alone the glory. By

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That's it in a nutshell. The

get busy copying... travelling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means of acquiring a skill.

They key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you've begun.

In every situation, at the beginning or end of the workday, you have a choice. You can look back or you can look forward. My advice: look forward. Always think about the next day. Don't go into the studio thinking, 'Hmmm, let's see what I was doing yesterday?' It takes more energy to twist yourself around and look back that it does to face forward.

There in a nutshell is the essence of creativity: There are a number of possibilities, but only one solution looks inevitable.

What is your idea of mastery? Having the experience to know what you want to do, the vision to see how to do it, the courage to work with what you're given, and the skill to execute that first impulse—all so you can take bigger chances.

I became my own rebellion. Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice. It's inevitable, which is why I have no regrets.

ciúnas gan uaigneas" := quietness without lonliness.

Use your worry, but know when to leave it behind.

Collaboration is how most of our ancestors used to work and live, before machines came along and fragmented society. Time to plant the fields? Everybody pitched in and got it done. Harvesttime? The community raced to get the crops in before the rains came. Where were those crops stored? In barns built by teams of neighbors. In the cities, the same spirit applied. Anonymous craftsmen spent their lives building cathedrals that wouldn't be completed for generations.

Zoe refers to the aggregate. Bios accommodates the notion of death, that each life has a beginning, middle, and end, that each life contains a story. Zoe, wrote Kerenyi, "does not admit of the experience of its own destruction: it is experienced without end, as infinite life.

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.

Personality is a skill.

Art is a vast democracy of habit.

When I can't build a cathedral, I build a bridge to get there.

My greatest dream is always to be luckier.