K.L. Tharp Quotes

Men and women are very different athletes, and frankly, I didn't want to deal with the male potential.

I don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.

A dancer's life is all about repetition.

if you want to create art, you'd best have a deep belief in yourself and no ulterior motives.

They've drummed the miraculous out of you, but you don't want it to be like that. You want the miraculous. You want everything to still be new.

Have you ever started to wave at someone and then realized they weren’t really waving at you, so you abort and go for a head scratch instead? That’s how I felt.

I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.

I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.

Life is an ocean, and most everyone's hanging on to some kind of dream to keep afloat.

To hell with tomorrow. To hell with all problems and barriers. Nothing matters but the Spectacular Now.

You think, 'Here's something I can hold on to,' but it always slips away.

It's fine to live in the now. But the best thing about now is that there's another one tomorrow. I'm going to start making them count.

Boredom is only for boring people with no imagination.

That's how our system works. It's a giant con game. One thing gets old, then you have to buy the next thing that gets old, then the next thing. Our whole society's a training ground for addicts.

Childhood was a fantastic country to live in.

Goodbye, I say, goodbye, as I disappear little by little into the middle of the middle of my own spectacular now

Just remember this- weird's good. Embrace the weird, dude. Enjoy it because it's never going away.

I like to think there's more to a person than just one thing.

Books seem a little old-fashioned, but hey, I can do old-fashioned if it's good.

It's more like I was daydreaming when the Supreme Being told me what I should do with my life, and it's too late to ask what it was.

That's how it is online—there's no time in cyberspace. It's almost like everything physical evaporates, and it's just your mind and the different sites floating in a void.

The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.

Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss.

Failing, and learning from it, is necessary. Unil you've done it, you're missing an important piece of your creative arsenal.

To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity.

The more you fail in private, the less you will fail in public.

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.

I always find that the best collaborations are when you work with people that know what they're doing, and you leave them alone to do it.

I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.

I've always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work - the rest is style.

But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it's certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn't working

I have to feel that each thing I've learned I can push to another point next time. I'm not very good with repetition. I would rather not work than feel that repetition is the order of the day.

Living had little use for me other than how it could be funneled into dance.

I have always felt one of the things dance should do - its business being so clearly physical - is challenge the culture's gender stereotypes.

As people who have commitments and obligations, we try to blockade emotions and go on our course towards excellence, and that's a lie. I've definitely paid a price. Everything is an exchange.

The disasteris not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect--this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they're not critical to a culture's existence.

There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn't lie, which words easily can do.

I do believe that when dancing is right, the movement possesses a logic common to us all.

Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut.

The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.

Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.

There's an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter.

That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action.

I understand things that are American, for better or worse.

You double your intensity with skill.

I always, somehow, knew that I was going to dance.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.

This is the hard part. Knowing and admitting a problem are not the same as solving it. But executing a solution is also the fun part, because the solution save you and gets you moving again.

I'm a known reader. That's what I do with my time.

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.