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Perfect practice makes perfect.

Twyla Tharp

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Twyla Tharp
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: July 1
Ballet Dancer
Choreographer
Dancer
Writer
Portland
Indiana
Practice
Perfect
Makes

More quotes by Twyla Tharp

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Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business.
Twyla Tharp
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The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.
Twyla Tharp
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I always find that the best collaborations are when you work with people that know what they're doing, and you leave them alone to do it.
Twyla Tharp
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I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines.
Twyla Tharp
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Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss.
Twyla Tharp
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I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.
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
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I can't emphasize this idea enough. Getting involved with your collaborator's problems almost always distracts you from your own. That can be tempting. That can be a relief. But it usually leads to disaster.
Twyla Tharp
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Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.
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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It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.
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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There's a paradox in the notion that creativity should be a habit. We think of creativity as a way of keeping everything fresh and new, while habit implies routine and repetition. That paradox intrigues me because it occupies the place where creativity and skill rub up against each other.
Twyla Tharp
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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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A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet, that the two disciplines were totally separate, and if you did one, you couldn’t do the other. I’m beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.
Twyla Tharp
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Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box
Twyla Tharp
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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
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Easily acquired. Inexpensive. Perfectly functional. Portable. Identifiable. Disposable. Eternal enough. These are my criteria for the perfect storage system. And I’ve found the answer in the simple file box.
Twyla Tharp
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I have always felt one of the things dance should do - its business being so clearly physical - is challenge the culture's gender stereotypes.
Twyla Tharp
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I began ear training when I was about six months old. My mother was a concert pianist, and she started all of her children with music before they were a year old. Then she began to see that I had a musical gift...
Twyla Tharp