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Creativity is an act of defiance.

Twyla Tharp

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Twyla Tharp
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: July 1
Ballet Dancer
Choreographer
Dancer
Writer
Portland
Indiana
Defiance
Creativity
Art
Writing

More quotes by Twyla Tharp

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You don't get into the mood to create – it's discipline.
Twyla Tharp
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The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.
Twyla Tharp
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The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.
Twyla Tharp
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Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.
Twyla Tharp
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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.
Twyla Tharp
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I'm willing to be regarded as a tyrant to keep my vision intact.
Twyla Tharp
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I'm often asked, 'Where do you get your ideas?' ...It's like asking, 'Where do you find air to breathe?' Ideas are all around you.
Twyla Tharp
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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.
Twyla Tharp
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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.
Twyla Tharp
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The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
Twyla Tharp
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You can keep on chewing gum for ten hours, but after about a minute and a half you've got all the good out of it.
Twyla Tharp
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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.
Twyla Tharp
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The art of these Fifties movies was in sustaining forever the moment before sex.
Twyla Tharp
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I think of music as fuel, its spectrum of energy governed by tempi, volume, and heart.
Twyla Tharp
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By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.
Twyla Tharp
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I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury.
Twyla Tharp
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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.
Twyla Tharp
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Men and women are very different athletes, and frankly, I didn't want to deal with the male potential.
Twyla Tharp
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I've always had to keep the walls in place, and the only way to do that is to keep yourself constantly occupied... From the time I was 8 years old, until I went to college, I worked... There was no social life.
Twyla Tharp
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When I'm in the studio, when I'm warm, when I'm what people call improvising, I feel a very special connection. I feel the most right. I don't want to become too mystic about this, but things feel as though they're in the best order at that particular moment.
Twyla Tharp