Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
Twyla Tharp
I see dance as glue for a community.
Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.
I had always seen myself as a star; I wanted to be a galaxy.
Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.
In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.
You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.
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.
The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.
Dance is the most fundamental of all art forms.
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.
Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.
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 compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart.
I would have to challenge the term, modern dance. I don't really use that term in relation to my work. I simply think of it as dancing. I think of it as moving.
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.
What we want from modern dance is courage and audacity.
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.
There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.
My favorite audience is everybody. I worked in a drive-in theater from the time I was 8 years old until I went to college, and I'm accustomed to everybody can buy a ticket and everybody should be taken into account.
Desire is the first thing a modern dancer should have. Skill can be developed. But if you don't have desire as a modern dancer, forget it.
I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.
Kids should be encouraged to compete.
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?
I do not watch television, never have.
I don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.
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.
Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.
These days, I think we could all agree that having a just-friend is not a bad thing.
My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.
I look for dancers who have all the technique in the world. But they must be dancers who are open-minded, who are willing to forget that they know anything. They also have to be gorgeous; they must have a clear image of themselves and strong personalities.
Schubert had arguably the same melodic gift as Mozart, but even less support. He didn't have the early exposure, never got to travel anywhere, and yet generated and amassed a body of work that grew and developed and is very profound.
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.
You either entertain an audience or you don't.
I've always felt compelled to explore range, because, as far as I know, we're only here once. So let's see how much we can encompass.
I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.
This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age.
Art is an investigation.
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 kind of thing.
Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere.
I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I'm not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to.
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 of my best shot.
I think people want very much to simplify their lives enough so that they can control the things that make it possible to sleep at night.
People often say to me, 'I don't know anything about dance.' I say, 'Stop. You got up this morning, and you're walking. You are an expert.'
When I say I can see through clothes, sometimes I try to use it as an X-ray vision to look into the dancer and see who this dancer is right now, at this exact moment in time. I live inside them in a way.
It's very important to work myself physically as hard as I can.
If you're speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty - and perhaps it's best approached as the art of constant maintenance.
After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves.
Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business.
When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, 'You've learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what's the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?'
When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful.
