413 Quotes by Twyla Tharp

I’ve always thought my creative life began the moment my mother called me Twyla.

You don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.

Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.

In those long and sleepless nights when I’m unable to shake my fears sufficiently, I borrow a biblical epigraph from Dostoyevsky’s The Demons: I see my fears being cast into the bodies of wild boars and hogs, and I watch them rush to a cliff where they fall to their deaths.

More often than not I’ve found, a rut is a consequence of sticking to tried and tested methods that don’t take into account how you or the world has changed.

Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.

Whether it’s a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.

In terms of individuals who actually inspired me, very few of the academic people that I had access to had that power over me. Maybe it’s simply because I wasn’t that committed to geometry.