Twyla Tharp Dance Quotations

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

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.

Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.

I see dance as glue for a community.

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

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

It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.

I often say that in making dances I can make a world where I think things are done morally, done democratically, done honestly.

Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.

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.

I also had a will that let me eliminate everything that stood in the way of my becoming the best dancer I could be. By a gradual process... (I) had invested every bit of my dreams, my hopes, my energies in defining myself as a dancer.

I do everything I know how in a dance.

Dancing is like bank robbery, it takes split-second timing.

Usually kids who are talented have the brashness to think they can do anything, but they don't often get the chance to see how close they can come.

You have to believe there's something at the other side. And you have to have faith in yourself. You have to think that you have the tools to accomplish it.

We're a machine and we have to be worked in the same way we have to be fed.

This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider. You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.

It's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.

I think that probably the moments of discovery do come from a place that is not totally organized. Order is something that we already know about. Discoveries are in a place we don't already know about.

I began to discriminate between fear and excitement. The two, though very close, are completely different. Fear is negative excitement, choking your imagination. Real excitement produces an energy that overcomes apprehension and makes you want to close in on your goal.

I always, somehow, knew that I was going to dance.

I repeat the wake-up, the workout, the quick shower, the breakfast of three hard-boiled egg whites and a cup of coffee, the hour to make my morning calls and deal with correspondence, the two hours of stretching and working out ideas by myself in the studio ... That's my day, every day. A dancer's life is all about repetition.

I have always felt one of the things dance should do - its business being so clearly physical - is challenge the culture's gender stereotypes.

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.

Dance is the stepchild of the arts.

dancers are allowed, indeed encouraged, to remain children forever ...