Twyla's Quotes

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

Creativity is an act of defiance.

I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.

We're doing the Twyla, not Twilight, so stop sucking!

Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.

Life is about moving, it’s about change. And when things stop doing that they’re dead.

Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box

The thing about creativity is, people are going to laugh at it. Get over it.

When you're in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.

You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work. But that's a moot point. The Zen master cleans his own studio. So should you.

If you only do what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won't fail. You'll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that's failure by erosion

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.

In the end all collaborations are love stories.

"Um, so, how do I work in the panties and toothbrush? I mean, it's not something you share over dinner," I pointed out, trying not to blush but feeling the heat. "He's got his tongue in your mouth," Krys began, "and he'll have his tongue in your mouth. You're on the couch, and you'll be on the couch. When he takes his tongue out of your mouth, find a way to whisper it in his ear. That'll speed things up." "Real quick," Twyla agreed on a short nod.

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

Remember this when you're struggling for a big idea. You're much better off scratching for a small one.

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

You are never lonely when the mind is engaged.

If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.

Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.

You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.

If you're at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout "Begin!" You never know where it will take you.

We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.

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 see the world in more than one way.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember , it's how we interpret it - for ourselves and others.

The goal is to connect with something old so it becomes new. Look and imagine.

Venturing out of your comfort zone may be dangerous, yet do it anyways because our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.

What have I told you about trying to sound ingratiatingly cute, Twyla?” she said. The little girl said, “You said I mustn’t. You said that exaggerated lisping is a hanging offense and I only do it to get attention.

I am magnetically drawn to images, whether they’re paintings, photographs, film, or video. They are all lodestones of inspiration to me.

Better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.

Don’t sign on for more problems than you must. Resist the temptation to involve yourself in other people’s zones of expertise and responsibility. Monitor troublesome situations if you need to, but don’t insert yourself unless you’re running out of time and a solution is nowhere in sight. In short, stifle your inner control freak.

Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent. Mozart was hardly some naive prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let music flow from his fingertips. It's a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss.

Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss

Do them anyway - you can never spend enough time on the basics.

Reading is your first line of defense against an empty head.

Creativity is a habit and the best creativity is the result of good work habits

Remember at all times that you're the one who'll be judged by the final product.

I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.

When I walk into [the studio] I am alone, but I am alone with my body, ambition, ideas, passions, needs, memories, goals, prejudices, distractions, fears. These ten items are at the heart of who I am. Whatever I am going to create will be a reflection of how these have shaped my life, and how I've learned to channel my experiences into them. The last two -- distractions and fears -- are the dangerous ones. They're the habitual demons that invade the launch of any project. No one starts a creative endeavor without a certain amount of fear; the key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you've begun. When I feel that sense of dread, I try to make it as specific as possible. Let me tell you my five big fears: 1. People will laugh at me. 2. Someone has done it before. 3. I have nothing to say. 4. I will upset someone I love. 5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind. "There are mighty demons, but they're hardly unique to me. You probably share some. If I let them, they'll shut down my impulses ('No, you can't do that') and perhaps turn off the spigots of creativity altogether. So I combat my fears with a staring-down ritual, like a boxer looking his opponent right in the eye before a bout. 1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven't yet, and they're not going to start now.... 2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it's all been done before. Nothing's original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself. 3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. 4. I will upset someone I love? A serious worry that is not easily exorcised or stared down because you never know how loved ones will respond to your creation. The best you can do is remind yourself that you're a good person with good intentions. You're trying to create unity, not discord. 5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, the 15th century architectural theorist, said, 'Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.' But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.

There's nothing wrong with fear; the only mistake is to let it stop you in your tracks.

Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.” —TWYLA THARP

In those long and sleepless nights when I’m unable to shake my fears sufficiently, I borrow a biblical epigraph from Dostoyevsky’s The Demons: I see my fears being cast into the bodies of wild boars and hogs, and I watch them rush to a cliff where they fall to their deaths.

I mean, are you even really gay?” I sighed. “Of course I’m gay. I’ve got something up my butt right now.” Twyla’s eyes widened in shock and her lips spread into a delighted grin. “You do? Oh, my God! What is it? Is it like a… place holder?” I shook my head and laughed into my hand. “There’s nothing up my butt. A placeholder? You’re nuts.

Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable.

Too much planning implies you've got it all under control. That's boring, unrealistic, and dangerous.

Without passion, all the skill in world won't lift you above your craft

As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.

I can't emphasize this idea enough. Getting involved with your collaborator's problems almost always distracts you from your own. That can be tempting. That can be a relief. But it usually leads to disaster.

A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they start their creative day. The composer Igor Stravinsky did the same thing every morning when he entered his studio to work: He sat at the piano and played a Bach fugue. Perhaps he needed the ritual to feel like a musician, or the playing somehow connected him to musical notes, his vocabulary. Perhaps he was honoring his hero, Bach, and seeking his blessing for the day. Perhaps it was nothing more than a simple method to get his fingers moving, his motor running, his mind thinking music. But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some click that got him started. In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that's habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.

In Hollywood, an adventure movie with two guys doesn’t quite qualify as an idea. Two guys and a bear does. It adheres to the unshakable rule that you don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.

Planning lets you impose order on the chaotic process of making something new, but when it's taken too far you get locked into a status quo, and creative thinking is about breaking free from the status quo, even from one you made yourself.

The previous governess had used various monsters and bogeymen as a form of discipline. There was always something waiting to eat or carry off bad boys and girls for crimes like stuttering or defiantly and aggravatingly persisting in writing with their left hand. There was always a Scissor Man waiting for a little girl who sucked her thumb, always a bogeyman in the cellar. Of such bricks is the innocence of childhood constructed. Susan’s attempts at getting them to disbelieve in the things only caused the problems to get worse. Twyla had started to wet the bed. This may have been a crude form of defense against the terrible clawed creature that she was certain lived under it. Susan had found out about this one the first night, when the child had woken up crying because of a bogeyman in the closet. She’d sighed and gone to have a look. She’d been so angry that she’d pulled it out, hit it over the head with the nursery poker, dislocated its shoulder as a means of emphasis and kicked it out of the back door. The children refused to disbelieve in the monsters because, frankly, they knew damn well the things were there. But she’d found that they could, very firmly, also believe in the poker. Now she sat down on a bench and read a book. She made a point of taking the children, every day, somewhere where they could meet others of the same age. If they got the hang of the playground, she thought, adult life would hold no fears. Besides, it was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying. There were lessons later on. These were going a lot better now she’d got rid of the reading books about bouncy balls and dogs called Spot. She’d got Gawain on to the military campaigns of General Tacticus, which were suitably bloodthirsty but, more importantly, considered too difficult for a child. As a result his vocabulary was doubling every week and he could already use words like “disemboweled” in everyday conversation. After all, what was the point of teaching children to be children? They were naturally good at it.

Another thing about knowing who you are is that you know what you should not be doing, which can save you a lot of heartaches and false starts if you catch it early on.

The real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.

I’m gonna guess that you finally came,” Chase said smugly. “If that’s what you want to call it. I came. I went. I’m done.

We want our artists to take the mundane materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us.

I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.

A dancer's life is all about repetition.

When Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey, he was drawing on centuries of history and folklore handed down by oral tradition. When Nicolas Poussin painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, he was re-creating Roman history. When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered.

Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life. We all know people who have announced that they've started work on a project-- say, a book-- but some time passes, and when you politely ask how it's going, they tell you that they're still researching. Weeks, months, years pass and they produce nothing. They have tons of research but it's never enough to nudge them toward the actual process of writing the book.

Frank was like a house with many rooms. The places inside him to which Twyla was allowed access were bright and interesting, but she knew there were dark closets and cobwebby cellars where he kept the difficult things locked away.

In the words of the choreographer Twyla Tharp, “Skill gets imprinted through action.” Assign yourself daily drills to practice the mechanical basics of the skill, whether reviewing flash cards or working with a kitchen knife. Learning all the recipes in the world won’t make you a great chef if you can’t chop, dice, and julienne those veggies.

Movement stimulates our brains in ways we don't appreciate

...get busy copying... travelling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means of acquiring a skill.

Like creativity, collaboration is a habit—and one I encourage you to develop.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That’s it in a nutshell. The

Do you know how hard it is to be in a house with a man that looks like Chase, who you know can fuck like a porn star, and not get any?!

They key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you've begun.

I’m starting to think you love reading more than you love me,” Babyface playfully told her. “It’s

You only need one good reason to commit to an idea, not four hun dred. But if you have four hundred reasons to say yes and one reason to say no, the answer is probably no.

I give you my happiness and my sorrow, my fortunes and my failures, my wisdom and my foolishness. Do you accept me as I am?” “I cherish all that you are, now and always,

I know better than to make you face the day without your caffeine, darlin'.

Darlin', I'm not going anywhere without you.

I had you in my life, and I had you in my future, and that was enough for me.

Here’s how I learned to improvise: I played some music in the studio and I started to move. It sounds obvious, but I wonder how many people, whatever their medium, appreciate the gift of improvisation. It’s your one opportunity in life to be completely free, with no responsibilities and no consequences. You don’t have to be good or even interesting. It’s you alone, with no one watching or judging. If anything comes of it, you decide whether the world gets to see it. In essence, you are giving yourself permission to daydream during working hours.

Your Creative Autobiography 1. What is the first creative moment you remember? 2. Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it? 3. What is the best idea you’ve ever had? 4. What made it great in your mind? 5. What is the dumbest idea? 6. What made it stupid? 7. Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea? 8. What is your creative ambition? 9. What are the obstacles to this ambition? 10. What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition? 11. How do you begin your day? 12. What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat? 13. Describe your first successful creative act. 14. Describe your second successful creative act. 15. Compare them. 16. What are your attitudes toward: money, power, praise, rivals, work, play? 17. Which artists do you admire most? 18. Why are they your role models? 19. What do you and your role models have in common? 20. Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you? 21. Who is your muse? 22. Define muse. 23. When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond? 24. When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness, or indifference in others, how do you respond? 25. When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond? 26. When you work, do you love the process or the result? 27. At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp? 28. What is your ideal creative activity? 29. What is your greatest fear? 30. What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening? 31. Which of your answers would you most like to change? 32. What is your idea of mastery? 33. What is your greatest dream?

I’ve spent most of my life being useful, and when a person has been useful for as long as I have, they come to believe that useful is all they are. But then you came along and wanted to spend time with me, for my own sake.

Never give a man a choice, her grandma Eloise had advised her a few days before her wedding. Never ask. Always tell him what he’s going to do. If you ask, you give him a choice, and if you give him a choice, he won’t do it.

Dance is a tough life (and a tougher way to make a living). Choreography is even more brutal because there is no way to carry our history forward. Our creations disappear the moment we finish performing them. It’s tough to preserve a legacy, create a history for yourself and others. But I put all that aside and pursued my gut instinct anyway. I became my own rebellion. Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice.

I promise to walk this life beside you. I will shoulder your burdens. I will consider your hopes and dreams and needs in all my decisions. I will show you acts of kindness, large and small. I will hold you in the dark of night. And I will find joy in this world with you at my side.

Michelangelo is celebrated for the Sistine Chapel; in fact, he supervised a dozen unacknowledged assistants. Even one of the greatest composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, chose to deflect credit for his compositions, writing at the bottom of each of his pieces “SDG,” for Soli Deo Gloria—to God alone the glory. By

Choreographer Twyla Tharp, who directed the opera and dance scenes for the film Amadeus, has this to say about the film’s portrait of Mozart: There are no ‘natural’ geniuses… No-one 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 compose… As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.

I, Mercy Elizabeth Birdsall, entrust you, Hartley James Ralston, with my life and all that I have made of it. I give you my happiness and my sorrow, my fortunes and my failures, my wisdom and my foolishness. Do you accept me as I am?” “I cherish all that you are, now and always,” Hart Ralston answered without needing to be prompted, his voice soft and gruff.

I'm in a room with the obligation to create a major dance piece. The dancers will be here in a few minutes. What are we going to do? To some people, this empty room symbolizes something profound, mysterious, and terrifying: the task of starting with nothing and working your way toward creating something whole and beautiful and satisfying... Some people find this moment - the moment before creativity begins - so painful that they simply cannot deal with it. They get up and walk away from he computer, the canvas, the keyboard; they take a nap or go shopping or fix lunch or do chores around the house. They procrastinate. In its most extreme form, this terror totally terrorizes people. The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.

Your job, after you have emptied your mind, is to slow down and think. To really think, on a regular basis. . . . Think about what’s important to you. . . . Think about what’s actually going on. . . . Think about what might be hidden from view. . . . Think about what the rest of the chessboard looks like. . . . Think about what the meaning of life really is. The choreographer Twyla Tharp provides an exercise for us to follow: Sit alone in a room and let your thoughts go wherever they will. Do this for one minute. . . . Work up to ten minutes a day of this mindless mental wandering. Then start paying attention to your thoughts to see if a word or goal materializes. If it doesn’t, extend the exercise to eleven minutes, then twelve, then thirteen . . . until you find the length of time you need to ensure that something interesting will come to mind. The Gaelic phrase for this state of mind is “quietness without loneliness.

It means never having enough to eat, or never being able to eat, because you’re too busy throwing up. It means peeing every five seconds. It means your boobs hurting and your ankles swelling. It means varicose veins and hemorrhoids. It means messing up your back for the rest of your life. It means rearranging everything inside you. It means your body never being the same again. It means being exhausted in ways you never knew possible. And it means dealing with all of that while trying to make it through each and every day like a functioning adult.

Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of success is showing up. Having written and directed fifty films in almost as many years, Allen clearly knows something about accomplishment. How, when, and where you show up is the single most important factor in executing on your ideas. That’s why so many creative visionaries stick to a daily routine. Choreographer Twyla Tharp gets up at the crack of dawn every day and hails a cab to go to the gym—a ritual she calls her “trigger moment.” Painter Ross Bleckner reads the paper, meditates, and then gets to the studio by 8 a.m. so that he can work in the calm quiet of the early morning. Writer Ernest Hemingway wrote five hundred words a day, come hell or high water. Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours. Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating. At the end of the day—or, really, from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.

Dreams in which the dead interact with the living are typically so powerful and lucid that there is no denying contact was real. They also fill us with renewed life and break up grief or depression. In chapter 16, on communicating with the dead, you will learn how to make such dreams come about. Another set of dreams in which the dead appear can be the stuff of horror. If you have had a nightmare concerning someone who has recently passed, know that you are looking into the face of personal inner conflict. You might dream, for instance, that your dead mother is buried alive or comes out of her grave in a corrupted body in search of you. What you are looking at here is the clash of two sets of ideas about death. On the one hand, a person is dead and rotting; on the other hand, that same person is still alive. The inner self uses the appropriate symbols to try to come to terms with the contradiction of being alive and dead at the same time. I am not sure to what extent people on the other side actually participate in these dreams. My private experience has given me the impression that the dreams are triggered by attempts of the departed for contact. The macabre images we use to deal with the contradiction, however, are ours alone and stem from cultural attitudes about death and the body. The conflict could lie in a different direction altogether. As a demonstration of how complex such dreams can be, I offer a simple one I had shortly after the death of my cat Twyla. It was a nightmare constructed out of human guilt. Even though I loved Twyla, for a combination of reasons she was only second best in the hierarchy of house pets. I had never done anything to hurt her, and her death was natural. Still I felt guilt, as though not giving her the full measure of my love was the direct cause of her death. She came to me in a dream skinned alive, a bloody mass of muscle, sinew, veins, and arteries. I looked at her, horror-struck at what I had done. Given her condition, I could not understand why she seemed perfectly healthy and happy and full of affection for me. I’m ashamed to admit that it took me over a week to understand what this nightmare was about. The skinning depicted the ugly fate of many animals in human hands. For Twyla, the picture was particularly apt because we used to joke about selling her for her fur, which was gorgeous, like the coat of a gray seal. My subconscious had also incorporated the callous adage “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” This multivalent graphic, typical of dreams, brought my feelings of guilt to the surface. But the real meaning was more profound and once discovered assuaged my conscience. Twyla’s coat represented her mortal body, her outer shell. What she showed me was more than “skin deep” — the real Twyla underneath,

And that’s only the beginning, because once you push that child into the world in a way that is incredibly hard on your body, not to mention dangerous, you’ll be the one with the equipment to feed the baby. Even if you decide to bottle feed, even if Everett promises to do his fair share, you are going to be up to your eyeballs in crappy assumptions from the days of the Old Gods that because you come with the equipment, you are somehow magically endowed with all the knowledge of how to be a parent, how to feed and clothe and diaper and take care of that precious human you put into the world. And that assumption touches everything. Everything. You’re the one who inherently knows how to navigate doctors’ appointments, babysitters, school, homework, when your kid needs new shoes, when your kid needs a hug, when your kid needs help… It will all fall to you—all of it—because you’re the one with the equipment.

Simple." Braydyn took a deep breath. "Those other lasses are vases and she's a flower pot." "Dude, what the hell are you talking about? Vases and flower pots?" Mitch furrowed his brow in confusion. "Vases are usually beautiful and purely decorative. They're sleek and sometimes expensive. But they are also the place flowers go te die. They can only bring life to the flower for so long before its empty shell eventually kills it. And if they're not used te temporarily hold flowers, then they're empty and meant for nothing more than te look pretty on someone's shelf or mantel." Bradyn leaned back in his chair, placed his hands on the back on his head and smiled, before continuing. "Now, a flower pot can be bonnie, painted, or even a little fancy. They can also be chipped and round and even plain. But they're filled with rich soil and if treated right, they are the places where flowers go te grow. Payton is a flower pot. Those other lasses are vases. I have no need for a vase.

For me, the most disturbing realization has been that, if you happen to be a female farmed animal, your quality of life drops to near zero. A sow will not know one ounce of human kindness during her entire life. In my experience, these are the most abused of all farmed animals. At breeding operations they are treated as 'bacon-makers.' They live in crates, row upon row, as far as their eyes can see, throughout their adult lives. They cannot even turn around between these bars. They live in filth, with rats (who sometimes eat the bodies of their dead piglets). Their world is one of such complete, unending hell; deprived of all comforts and stimulation, that they are driven mad. These intelligent, sensitive farmed animals return what they sense from us; even the boars--intact males--have been gentle with me. Their babies, the ones who are slightly too small or slightly too weak, are 'PACed'--an industry term meaning 'Pounded Against Concrete.' These piglets are swung by their rear legs, smashing their heads into a wall or concrete floor in order to kill them--all in front of their helpless mothers.

Sunny, you’re like an open book. And I already know the story. But I want to read it anyway.

Susan says don’t get afraid, get angry,” said Twyla.

...but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss.

You remember much more than you may think you do, in ways you haven't considered.

In every situation, at the beginning or end of the workday, you have a choice. You can look back or you can look forward. My advice: look forward. Always think about the next day. Don't go into the studio thinking, 'Hmmm, let's see what I was doing yesterday?' It takes more energy to twist yourself around and look back that it does to face forward.

His wet hands covered in white suds grasped her face and his mouth crushed down upon hers. It was not a soft, getting-to-know-you kiss. It was immediate heat. Hard and intense.

maybe the first man you spend Valentine’s Day with will be the man who stays.

Personality is a skill.