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.
Interpretation
Passion and skill are both essential for creativity; one cannot substitute for the other.
This quote by Twyla Tharp emphasizes the importance of both passion and skill in the creative process. Passion fuels the motivation to create, while skill provides the technical ability to execute ideas. Without a balance of both, a person may lack the drive to pursue their craft or the ability to bring their visions to life, leading to a stagnant creative experience. The essence of a fulfilling creative life lies in the harmonious blending of these two elements.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about pursuing a career in the arts.
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.
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.
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 are 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.
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.
Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.
The artist is a strange being. I think it's safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.
The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.
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