Quotes from Twyla Tharp

My mother was a dominant force in my life. She had a very specific idea about education, which was: you should know everything about everything. It was quite simple. There was no exclusivity, and there really was no judgment.

Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.

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

If a thing moves, it lives.

When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, 'You've learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what's the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?'

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

Unfortunately, I think we've probably all had the experience that if we're in a relationship where one of the partners is doing it 'my' way, that relationship is not going to survive.

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

I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women.

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

I'm not interested in seeing dance die. It's not to my advantage. Nor is it to our culture's advantage or anybody else's.

Let me put it this way: I would like to direct a successful film. An unsuccessful film I would not like to direct. Films are very difficult.

In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.

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

I would have to challenge the term, modern dance. I don't really use that term in relation to my work. I simply think of it as dancing. I think of it as moving.

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.

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

This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age.

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

I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I'm not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to.

I am fairly concise when I work and I work quickly because I think work is done better in a high gear than done our in a gear when everyone's exhausted. Get focused, do it!

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That's it in a nutshell ... In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

I've always believed that a dance evening energizes an audience, that an audience goes out feeling chemically stronger and more optimistic. This is what I understand about dance. And this is an important thing. We need this. Our culture needs it.

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