Quote

Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it's one place you can process them.

Twyla Tharp

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Twyla Tharp
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: July 1
Ballet Dancer
Choreographer
Dancer
Writer
Portland
Indiana
Comedy
Separating
Process
Tragic
Place
Allows
Soul
Survive
Things
Comic
Emotions
Particularly
Emotion

More quotes by Twyla Tharp

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Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit.
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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.
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Failing, and learning from it, is necessary. Unil you've done it, you're missing an important piece of your creative arsenal.
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The content and thematic materials of dance is, of itself, like boxing. You play tennis and baseball. But boxing is not a sport you play: you stand up and do it.
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Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.
Twyla Tharp
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To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity.
Twyla Tharp
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I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.
Twyla Tharp
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It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.
Twyla Tharp
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when the time came I would do battle with my mother for the right to sit at the center of my own life.
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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.
Twyla Tharp
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Limits are a secret blessing, and bounty can be a curse.
Twyla Tharp
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Don’t sign on for more problems than you must. Resist the temptation to involve yourself in other people’s zones of expertise and responsibility. Monitor troublesome situations if you need to, but don’t insert yourself unless you’re running out of time and a solution is nowhere in sight. In short, stifle your inner control freak.
Twyla Tharp
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When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can't simulate in a sedentary position.
Twyla Tharp
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It's vital to establish some rituals-automatic but decisive patterns of behavior-at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way.
Twyla Tharp
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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.
Twyla Tharp
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My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.
Twyla Tharp
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To make real change, you have to be well anchored - not only in the belief that it can be done, but also in some pretty real ways about who you are and what you can do.
Twyla Tharp
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Living had little use for me other than how it could be funneled into dance.
Twyla Tharp
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I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I'm not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to.
Twyla Tharp
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I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.
Twyla Tharp