Twyla Tharp

“'Bum's Rush' is a piece about timing, and everything that's in the piece needs to be with the piece. If people are missing, or marking, or unable to use their voices, the impulses that promp...”

“Creativity is not just for artists. It's for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to s...”

“Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology. His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests.”

“I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories. Either something works, or it doesn't.”

“Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.”

“If I didn't believe in myself as a dancer, I wouldn't choreograph.”

“I thought I had to make an impact on history. I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission. Posterity deals with us however it sees fit. But I gave it 20 years...”

“My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.”

“My dancers expect me to deliver because my choreography represents their livelihood.”

“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.”

“'The Creative Habit' is basically about how you work alone, how you survive as a solitary artist. 'The Collaborative Habit' is obviously about surviving with other people.”

“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 w...”

“A commission is an invitation to fall in love.”

“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 an...”

“Counterpoint is a component that gives real energy, and it is about optimism.”

“Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to...”

“What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.”

“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 ki...”

“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!”

“I used to say to myself, 'Well, in the old days everybody danced because they loved to dance, and there was none of this professional garbage going on about how much can you get for this or...”