Twyla Tharp - The Creative Habit ( Book Notes)

 As part of the photography course I'm taking, I'm reading books recommended by the artist/instructor. Twyla Tharp - The Creative Habit - Learn It and Use It for Life is one of many books he recommended. 

Below are some of the things I found interesting.

- Being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. Set a goal for yourself - write 1,500 words or stay at your desk until noon. But the real secret is that they do this every day. In other words, they are disciplined. 

- Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.

- Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was 28 years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. 

- If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge. 

- There is no one ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. 

- It's all been done before. Nothing's really original. 

- I'm often subtracting things from my life rather than adding them (e.g., movies, multitasking, background music).

- Ralph Waldo Emerson sought solitude and simplicity. Henry David Thoreau turned his back on the distractions of his life in pursuit of a better and clearer life. 

- What is the one tool that feeds your creativity and is so essential that without it you feel naked and unprepared? 

- You're never lonely when your mind is engaged.

- Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that. 

- Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.

- Every day you don't practice you're one day further from being good.

- You won't be of much value to others if you don't learn to value yourself and your efforts.

- Take inventory of your skills. Pick one of your skills from this list and remove it. What's left/ What can you accomplish without it? 

- Henri Matisse was bedridden in his home in the south of France with only the use of his arms and imagination in his final years. But he wasn't going to stop working. His mind wouldn't rest. So he came up with a new way of working: paper cutouts. These exquisitely pure creations, out of the most childlike materials, are...the essence of his art. 

- My heroes are the artists whose bodies of work are consistently surprising, consistently fresh: Mozart, Beethoven, Veldi, Dostoyevsky, Yeats, Cezanne, Kurosawa, and Balanchine. They all had stunning early triumphs, and they kept getting better through their middle and later years.