Twyla Tharp Quotes

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

"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."

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

"It was not until I had graduated from college that I made a professional commitment to it. Frankly, I didn't think it wise. I was my own interior parental force, and it's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer."

"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."

"Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism."

"The formal education that I received made little sense to me."

"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."

"The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts."

"The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing."

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

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

"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."

"I never studied with Balanchine, but his work was very important to me."

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

"I think people want very much to simplify their lives enough so that they can control the things that make it possible to sleep at night."

"I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching."

"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."

"There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything."

"With each piece I've completed I have worked to make it intact, and each of them has been an equal high. It's like children. A mother refuses to pick out one as a favorite, and I can't do any better with the dances."