Twyla Tharp Quotes

My absolutely favorite time of working on a project is the time I spend not knowing what it is. Because the longer you live inside that period, the likelier you are to discover something new.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

I spent a lot of time on recce. It is a kind of creative chaos, but I like the sense of creative serendipity.

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab.

Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know.

It often feels like a tremendous amount of work is required to get an idea moving forward, like pushing a train uphill. But at a certain point, the thing takes on its own momentum, and takes unexpected turns. So it's that feeling of holding on, rather than pushing it, that is the most exciting thing. It's that need to occasionally bounce off the walls, letting anything happen for any reason, and having nothing to guide you that is the joy.

I have nothing. My model is I have nothing figured out, and I'm starting with some little nugget and hoping that it will talk back to me enough to let it grow.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

Musical accidents are a gold mine. The thing about accidental discoveries is they won't be made unless you put yourself in a position to make that discovery. To do that means hundreds of hours, days and weeks where you do things and don't discover anything.

I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery... I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be more conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn - as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts and names for things.

If the playwright knew every little thing about his play, why bother? There must be discovery all the time, otherwise why bother to do it?

Life isn't a science. We make it up as we go.

I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.

I think what's so great about making your first feature film is that you're so naive in some ways; you don't know what to expect, and you don't question things as much because you're just trying to figure it out as you go.

The different bodies of my work end themselves when there's no more discovery to be had.

We don't always know what we're doing. We often just get excited, put something down, and say, 'Oh, neat'.

People ask me, 'What's your next film?' And I never know.

So much of making movies is about discovery on the day, what you're figuring out. If you know everything going in, then it's not worth doing - it's already done.

My films are so new and unique that I don't know where I will end up. Fear keeps me alert. And it's also a part of an excitement.

A lot of our creative flow comes from a place of curiosity and exploration. It often feels like we're excavating and asking questions and not just giving answers but really just exploring.

Give the composer time to experiment, time to try out ideas. Also, the time to fail. When the composer has very little time, the temptation is to reach for stock ideas - ideas they know will work and have worked in the past.

I miss that thing I used to do when I first started out where I would just spontaneously generate ideas and try things and see where they'd go.

I'm always looking to make something that didn't exist before, fumbling about in the dark, not just while making a collection. The search for something new is a constant in my everyday life. But constantly searching for something new is like looking for a well in a desert.