Twyla Tharp Quotes

I think songwriting was the biggest way that I found my identity.

It's interesting, because I named my first album after my dad because I wanted to find him. My second album was named after my mom because I felt like I learned all my creative talents I learned from her. All the survival stuff, too. And then the next album is 'Maya,' which is not my real name. It's fake.

When I go back and read my journals or fiction, I am always surprised. I may not remember having those thoughts, but they still exist and I know they are mine, and it's all part of making sense of who I am.

My mom really raised me, so I took her name before I ever thought about having a career. It was for personal reasons. My birth name is actually Max Deitch.

I have done everything I can to make sure my daughter knows her father because you form your own identity by rebelling against your parents - but first you have to know them.

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that - that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

My mom never went to college, so she just assumed the writer identity, and that was always really inspiring to me. It's not something you need nine levels of education for. It's really an identity that you claim for yourself, and then you have to make yourself one.

When the band first started, it was so much about carving out some space for myself and our audience and our songs.

Greta Gerwig always seemed like a name that was mine. My mother did a good job.

People often ask me when I realised that I was different. Some people seem surprised that it's a question that I cannot answer. I was never told that I was different. I was always just Sinead; I was just like my dad.

I find a lot of inspiration through visuals. When I was 12, I saw Aurora's 'Runaway' music video. Something inside me clicked, like, 'That is what I want to do, no matter whether it goes anywhere or not.'

I think, a lot of times, people don't want to do what their parents do because they want to be their own person.

Especially as an artist, the creative freedom we have makes us who we are. We're human beings-we're gonna mess up sometimes. I definitely feel like people should continue being who they are. As long as you're staying true to who you are, that's super important.

When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother's, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel.

What if you wake up some day, and you're 65... and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?

...fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me? (140)

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in what he creates.