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I write. I have read a great deal. I enjoy books. I like the wit of languages. Even French I like. I like to be able to think in different modes. I like to be able to use the language a great deal and carry on rehearsals in French.

Twyla Tharp

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Twyla Tharp
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: July 1
Ballet Dancer
Choreographer
Dancer
Writer
Portland
Indiana
Thinking
Write
Carry
Like
Able
Deal
Book
Deals
Rehearsals
Great
Books
Modes
Different
Read
Rehearsal
Writing
Enjoy
Languages
Even
Language
Wit
Think
Use
French

More quotes by Twyla Tharp

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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
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Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.
Twyla Tharp
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No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
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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There are so few people who can really take hold of art and sort of eat and chew it up. Somehow it's got to be held special, sacred in a corner, and if you don't do the same thing with it, if you're not equally reverential, serious, and pompous about it, well, then you're not a great artist. Who needs that?
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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Creativity requires quite a lot of faith - not just in yourself but also in the knowledge that you have the right to proceed, even when you may not know exactly what you're doing.
Twyla Tharp
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I learned very early that an audience would relax and look at things differently if they felt they could laugh with you from time to time. There's an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter.
Twyla Tharp
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I was interested in becoming a show dancer, for which I tried, but I'm not tall enough.
Twyla Tharp
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I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching.
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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I don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.
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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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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Everyone has a talent. It's simply a question of good discipline, of the good fortune to have an education that meshes with that talent, and a lot of luck.
Twyla Tharp
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Whenever I feel I'm working in a groove it's invariably because I feel I am being the benefactor in the situation rather than the beneficiary. I am sharing my art with others, lending my craft to theirs, interest-free with no IOU.
Twyla Tharp
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I am fairly concise when I work and I work quickly because I think work is done better in a high gear than done our in a gear when everyone's exhausted. Get focused, do it!
Twyla Tharp
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When creativity has become your habit when you've learned to manage time, resources, expectations, and the demands of others when you understand the value and place of validation, continuity, and purity of purpose, then you're on the way to an artist's ultimate goal the achievement of mastery.
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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But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it's certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn't working
Twyla Tharp