I always tell students that you've got to be practical. You do not need a dream. You need a purpose, something you can wake up to in the morning when the dream is dissipated.
Interpretation
Having a purpose is more important than merely dreaming; it provides motivation for daily life.
Twyla Tharp emphasizes the importance of practicality over idealism in this quote. While dreams can be inspiring, they often fade away in the face of reality. What truly sustains us and gives our lives direction is a clear purpose—something we can focus on and strive towards every day, especially when the initial excitement of our dreams begins to fade.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a graduation ceremony to motivate students to find their purpose.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
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.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
My mom was a teacher - I have the greatest respect for the profession - we need great teachers - not poor or mediocre ones.
In the 2013 Economists Program, we hired 51 percent women, 49 percent men. And the reason for that is that we have a draft from all over the world, and we've hired, for instance, in that group, a good number of Chinese economists - highly qualified, all Ph.D.s from the best universities of the world. And guess what? They're all women.
Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and-rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
The library, I believe, is the last of our public institutions to which you can go without credentials. You don't even need the sticker on your windshield that you need to get into the public beach. All you need is the willingness to read.
When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.
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