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Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.

Twyla Tharp

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Twyla Tharp
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: July 1
Ballet Dancer
Choreographer
Dancer
Writer
Portland
Indiana
Lifeblood
Metaphor
Art

More quotes by Twyla Tharp

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In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.
Twyla Tharp
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We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.
Twyla Tharp
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It's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.
Twyla Tharp
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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.
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 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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Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.
Twyla Tharp
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I had always seen myself as a star I wanted to be a galaxy.
Twyla Tharp
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Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.
Twyla Tharp
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The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.
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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A dancer's life is all about repetition.
Twyla Tharp
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I walk into a large white room. It's a dance studio in midtown Manhattan. The room is clean, virtually spotless if you don’t count the thousands of skid marks and footprints left there by dancers rehearsing. Other than the mirrors, the boom box, the skid marks, and me, the room is empty.
Twyla Tharp
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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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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.
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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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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You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work. But that's a moot point. The Zen master cleans his own studio. So should you.
Twyla Tharp
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Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut.
Twyla Tharp
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I had received my first establishment grants in response to applications filed the year before. To the pages of baffling forms I had simply attached a handwritten note saying, 'I make dances, not applications. Send the money. Love, Twyla.
Twyla Tharp