Twyla Tharp Quotes

If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.

When I wrote the opera, I made a deal with myself that for at least an hour a day I would work on it, even if it meant just sitting on my piano bench, staring into space and thinking about it. It's about keeping it regular, like your bowel movements - let's get real: it's your bodily artistic movements! It comes from the same place.

The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightening bold of inspiration, maybe more. And this routine is available to everyone.

Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'

If you're a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it's always shifting.

I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if you will - about discovering another voice, another instrument, another way of looking at things, another way of perceiving things.

I'm always creating. Whether I'm writing a lyric or making a beat, every day I'm doing something.

We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

I have disciplined myself when I'm working. When I discovered art, I realized that one could keep that search going within creation. But I also realize that in order to create the art, you have to stay, you can't go too far.

A creative moment is part of a longer creative process which, in turn, is part of a creative life.

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.

There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear calamities of earth; both lead to the heaven and away from hell-Art and Science. But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.

The creative process requires chaos before form emerges.

A lot of artists need structure.

I don't believe in inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. Some of the time you know you're cooking, and the rest of the time, you just do it.

No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.

You can't really do anything creative without a source of inspiration.

The creative universe begins with its essentiality, and, whatever path the imagination takes, ends with its purity.

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, ‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’­—the boundary of the unknown.’ But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

You hope that the ideas will come together. You just don't know. That's part of what I suppose is part of being brave and putting creative work out there.

I'm 44 now; I feel better than I did when I was 34. I've got more clarity now. I wake up in the morning, and I write my blog, and then I go upstairs, and I work on music. And I do that every day. That's what I do. I don't check in once a week and think, "Oh, I've gotta come up with something now." I'm always writing. I was just in a coffee shop in Chelsea last night, just killing time, waiting for a friend, and I sat and wrote enough for three good songs. I love it. This is my life. It's all I do.

A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.

Paint something every day.