You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.
Interpretation
Ideas come to life through action and physical expression.
Twyla Tharp's quote emphasizes the importance of taking tangible actions to foster creativity and generate ideas. It suggests that true inspiration and innovation are not merely mental exercises; they require engagement in physical practices, such as writing or painting, to transform thoughts into reality.
In practice
In a workshop on creativity, you could use this quote to encourage participants to start creating.
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.
Nobody knows what will work until they try it. Some of comics' biggest success stories in recent years have explored subjects that no one was writing about at the time - stories no one had any reason to think would succeed. My advice? Write what you want to read. You'll have more fun doing it - and if all else fails, you'll always have at least one loyal reader.
I think that in order to struggle you have to be creative. In my life, creativity has been something that has sustained me; it awoke my spiritual struggle.
I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
It isn't till now, in the American Century, as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.
We are all creative, but by the time we are three of four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else.
People want to be creatively satisfied, and having fun is such an important part of that.
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