Twyla Tharp Art Quotations

The art of these Fifties movies was in sustaining forever the moment before sex.

if you want to create art, you'd best have a deep belief in yourself and no ulterior motives.

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.

There are so few people who can really take hold of art and sort of eat and chew it up. Somehow it's got to be held special, sacred in a corner, and if you don't do the same thing with it, if you're not equally reverential, serious, and pompous about it, well, then you're not a great artist. Who needs that?

My greatest fear in working is always the end. Lately I have taken to tricking myself into finishing by leaving a hole in the middle somewhere, then stitching the two pieces together - the Union Pacific approach.

Whenever I feel I'm working in a groove it's invariably because I feel I am being the benefactor in the situation rather than the beneficiary. I am sharing my art with others, lending my craft to theirs, interest-free with no IOU.

Dance is the stepchild of the arts.

when dancing is right, the movement possesss a logic common to us all, an inevitability that takes it beyond the personal and egocentric and makes of it classical art.

No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they'll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them.

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.

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.

When creativity has become your habit; when you've learned to manage time, resources, expectations, and the demands of others; when you understand the value and place of validation, continuity, and purity of purpose, then you're on the way to an artist's ultimate goal; the achievement of mastery.

I don't believe in rushing and saying this is done and over with. That form of rebellion doesn't make sense to me. I've always attempted to familiarize myself with the traditions, and consider that a responsibility of the artist.

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.

While most people in the arts think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative....the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.

I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart.

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.

Art is running away without ever leaving home.

I think of music as fuel, its spectrum of energy governed by tempi, volume, and heart.

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.

Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. . . The one thing that creative souls around the world have in common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills. Art is a vast democracy of habit.

It takes skill to bring something you've imagined into the world: to use words to create believable lives, to select the colors and textures of paint to represent a haystack at sunset, to combine ingredients to make a flavorful dish. No one is born with that skill. It is developed through exercise, through repitition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time. . . . If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

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.

Nobody likes to see that which they've invested in disappear from the face of the earth before they've even died. This is not cool. We can now see what the landmarks are.

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.

I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories. Either something works, or it doesn't.

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

Creativity is an act of defiance.

Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.

Art is an investigation.

If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember , it's how we interpret it - for ourselves and others.

dance is simply the refinement of human movement - walking, running, and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.

Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn't have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.

Dance is the most fundamental of all art forms.

When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.