Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.
Interpretation
Creativity thrives on the material around us, but requires preparation to harness that potential.
In this quote, Twyla Tharp emphasizes the importance of recognizing the creative potential in everything around us. She highlights that while all experiences and materials can contribute to one's creativity, without proper preparation and the ability to fully engage with them, these elements may go unnoticed and unutilized.
In practice
In an art workshop, to inspire students to embrace all forms of creative input.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
I don't find my life that interesting. The shows, maybe. But not me.
Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.
What entrepreneurs and artists have in common is that they give the world something it didn't know it was missing.
Films made by women belong to the history of cinema; it's just that we get erased pretty quickly.
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