The Creative Habit Quotes

“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.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“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.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“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.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Without passion, all the skill in world won't lift you above your craft”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“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.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“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.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“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.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“The real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“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.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“We want our artists to take the mundane materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“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.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“...get busy copying... travelling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means of acquiring a skill.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Movement stimulates our brains in ways we don't appreciate”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That’s it in a nutshell. The”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“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’re 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.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Pick out a man and woman together and write down everything they do until you get to twenty items. The man may touch the woman’s arm. Write it down. She may run her hand through her hair. Write it down. She may shake her head. He may lean in toward her. She may pull away or lean in toward him. She may put her hands in her pockets or search for something in her purse. He may turn his head to watch another woman walking by. Write it all down. It shouldn’t take you very long to acquire twenty items. If you study the list, it shouldn’t be hard to apply your imagination to it and come up with a story about the couple.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“If you understand the strands of your creative DNA, you begin to see how they mutate into common threads in your work. You begin to see the “story” that you’re trying to tell; why you do the things you do (both positive and self-destructive); where you are strong and where you are weak (which prevents a lot of false starts), and how you see the world and function in it.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“I’m not sure how to do it: A problem, obviously, but we’re not talking about constructing the Brooklyn Bridge. If you try and it doesn’t work, you’ll try a different way next time.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“It’s self-indulgent: So? How often do you indulge yourself? Why shouldn’t you? You won’t be of much value to others if you don’t learn to value yourself and your efforts.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“You’re not alone anymore; your goal, your idea, is your companion.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“First, you must generate the idea, usually from memory or experience or activity. Then you have to retain it—that is, hold it steady in your mind and keep it from disappearing. Then you have to inspect it—study it and make inferences about it. Finally, you have to be able to transform it—alter it in some way to suit your higher purposes. Some people are good at some of these but not all four. They can generate an idea, but they can’t hold on to it or transform it. My problem was that I was generating a lot of ideas, but generating was at odds with my need to retain, inspect, and transform.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“If you’re privileged enough to be able to do that for forty-five minutes a few days a week, you have been given something wonderful.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“As we age, it’s hard to recapture the recklessness of youth, when new ideas flew off us like light from a pinwheel sparkler. But we more than compensate for this with the ideas we do generate, and with our hard-earned wisdom about how to capture and, more importantly, connect those ideas. When I was young I understood very little about the value of a spine to a piece; I wasted time and energy by moving blindly in many directions, when a clearer understanding of spine would have kept me on the path I wanted. I’ve learned so much more about my own preferences. I know that my best work comes out of my creative DNA that seeks to reconcile the competing forces of zoe and bios. I’ve grown more efficient in my efforts; I’ve seen enough dead ends to know when an enticing trail will get me nowhere. And I’ve learned to see continuity in all I do.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“I was fifty-eight years old when I finally felt like a “master choreographer.” The occasion was my 128th ballet, The Brahms-Haydn Variations, created for American Ballet Theatre. For the first time in my career I felt in control of all the components that go into making a dance—the music, the steps, the patterns, the deployment of people onstage, the clarity of purpose. Finally I had the skills to close the gap between what I could see in my mind and what I could actually get onto the stage. Why did it take 128 pieces before I felt this way? A better question would be, Why not? What’s wrong with getting better as you get more work under your belt? The libraries and archives and museums are packed with early bloomers and one-trick ponies who said everything they had to say in their first novel, who could only compose one good tune, whose canvases kept repeating the same dogged theme. My respect has always gone to those who are in it for the long haul. When people who have demonstrated talent fizzle out or disappear after early creative success, it’s not because their gifts, that famous “one percent inspiration,” abandoned them; more likely they abandoned their gift through a failure of perspiration.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“and open without effort, letting the ball bearing fall noisily into the pie pans. That’s when he would wake up and write down whatever idea was in his head at that moment. It was his way of coming up with ideas without his conscious mind censoring them. The Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn says that ideas can be acted upon in four ways. First, you must generate the idea, usually from memory or experience or activity. Then you have to retain it—that is, hold it steady in your mind and keep it from disappearing. Then you have to inspect it—study it and make inferences about it. Finally, you have to be able to transform it—alter it in some way to suit your higher purposes. Some”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“What is your idea of mastery? Having the experience to know what you want to do, the vision to see how to do it, the courage to work with what you’re given, and the skill to execute that first impulse—all so you can take bigger chances.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life