Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Twyla Tharp
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: July 1
Ballet Dancer
Choreographer
Dancer
Writer
Portland
Indiana
Firsts
Forms
Attached
First
Response
Grants
Years
Pages
Note
Handwritten
Make
Simply
Application
Filed
Love
Saying
Received
Baffling
Year
Establishment
Assertiveness
Money
Send
Applications
Form
Notes
Dances

More quotes by Twyla Tharp

Image
I think of music as fuel, its spectrum of energy governed by tempi, volume, and heart.
Twyla Tharp
Image
Dancing is like bank robbery, it takes split-second timing.
Twyla Tharp
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Art is running away without ever leaving home.
Twyla Tharp
Image
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
Image
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.
Twyla Tharp
Image
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
Image
I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart.
Twyla Tharp
Image
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
Image
Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.
Twyla Tharp
Image
I have not wanted to intimidate audiences. I have not wanted my dancing to be an elitist form. That doesn't mean I haven't wanted it to be excellent.
Twyla Tharp
Image
Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box
Twyla Tharp
Image
Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. . . The one thing that creative souls around the world have in common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills. Art is a vast democracy of habit.
Twyla Tharp
Image
The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.
Twyla Tharp
Image
We're a machine and we have to be worked in the same way we have to be fed.
Twyla Tharp
Image
Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut.
Twyla Tharp
Image
The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.
Twyla Tharp
Image
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