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 was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching. – Twyla Tharp
Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody’s present pops out of nowhere. – Twyla Tharp
It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience. – Twyla Tharp
People often say to me, ‘I don’t know anything about dance.’ I say, ‘Stop. You got up this morning, and you’re walking. You are an expert.’ – Twyla Tharp
Desire is the first thing a modern dancer should have. Skill can be developed. But if you don’t have desire as a modern dancer, forget it. – Twyla Tharp
If you’re speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty – and perhaps it’s best approached as the art of constant maintenance. – Twyla Tharp
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
There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn’t lie, which words easily can do. – Twyla Tharp
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
The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts. – Twyla Tharp
I’m obviously always interested in the dancer who’s an athlete and vice versa. I expect dancers to be in condition like an athlete is and to challenge themselves in the same way, to the same physical degree. – Twyla Tharp
Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called ‘In Search of Lost Time,’ and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language. – Twyla Tharp
I always tell students that you’ve got to be practical. You do not need a dream. You need a purpose, something you can wake up to in the morning when the dream is dissipated. – Twyla Tharp
Work is work; wherever I’m working, I do the best I can. If the actual dollars come from investors as opposed to taxpayers and patrons, what’s the difference? – Twyla Tharp
I don’t think politicians should be allowed into power who are not familiar with their bodies, because that’s where our bottom line is. And I know that they would make totally different decisions if they felt responsible simply for their own bodies. – 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 learned very early that an audience would relax and look at things differently if they felt they could laugh with you from time to time. There’s an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter. – Twyla Tharp
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action. – Twyla Tharp
Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That’s the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart. – Twyla Tharp
Things change all the time, so why do people make such a philosophical to-do that things are constantly in transition? – Twyla Tharp
The ultimate point of a piece for me is that it drives the next one. Does it open new doors? That’s the success of a piece. – 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
