Explore Quotes by Twyla Tharp

Unfortunately, I think we've probably all had the experience that if we're in a relationship where one of the partners is doing it 'my' way, that relationship is not going to survive.

Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language.

It's always a problem, getting the curtain in at the end of the first act; having enough of a resolve so that you can bring the curtain in and then opening the show a second time is a little bizarre as a tradition. I've always preferred to go straight through.

Broadway has some very tight expectations as to what a show is.

I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.

We don't need to illustrate music; music illustrates itself.

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

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

When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.

No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they'll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them.

It's very important to work myself physically as hard as I can.

I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.

Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut.

I do not watch television, never have.

There is a moral dimension, for me, in anything that's any good.

Work is work; wherever I'm working, I do the best I can. If the actual dollars come from investors as opposed to taxpayers and patrons, what's the difference?

To survive, you've got to keep wheedling your way. You can't just sit there and fight against odds when it's not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel - and find a way to keep moving.

I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.

I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.

There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.

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.