Quotes & Sayings About Improvisation

The rules of improvisation appealed to me not only as a way of creating comedy, but as a worldview. Studying improvisation literally changed my life. It set me on a career path toward Saturday Night Live. It changed the way I look at the world, and it's where I met my husband. What has your cult done for you lately? — Tina Fey

People have their own interests and they want to play a certain kind of music. People want to play in orchestras. They want to play on Broadway. Those that want to play traditional jazz and have no interests in the ideas of improvisation. So in spit of the fact that there are fifty violin players, you might only narrow it down to ten and within those ten, there might only be three who have the right kind of background and credentials to deal with what you need to deal with. Everybody's got their own special thing that they are after and a lot of times you don't have time to be training people. — Henry Threadgill

Composition is selective improvisation. — Igor Stravinsky

Not with the Rochester Philharmonic, but I formed my own orchestra, made up of musicians from the Eastman School, where I'm on the faculty now, direct the Jazz Ensemble and teach improvisation classes. — Chuck Mangione

Peace demands more, not less, from a people. Peace lacks the clarity of purpose and the cadence of war. War is scripted: peace is improvisation. — Richard M. Nixon

He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet. — William Golding

In comedy, my strengths are improvisation. — Kevin Hart

I know all about improvisation and the free-form that mirrors the chaos of our time, but I do like to feel that the playwright has done some work before I got there. — Jean Kerr

If you just want to be a writer, I don't care, for pitching, for writing dialogue, you should take an improvisation class. It's super important. — Thomas Lennon

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he? — Joan Didion

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it? — Peter Wright

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own. — Sonny Rollins

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book. — Carson McCullers

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music. — Sonny Rollins

Well David "Fathead" Newman was my first experience with improvisation. When I saw him play for the first time I realized that there is an importance of spontaneous music being made on the spot. It was so soulful and singing through his horn. So that's how I was inspired early on. — Roy Hargrove

Actors need bricks to play with, and in fact we rejected all the improvised fragments we had made without a plan. Improvisation without a plan is like tennis without tennis balls. — Lars Von Trier

One of the innate dilemmas of biography is that life is not much like a book. It rarely contains a clearly stated thesis, coherently developed. Life sprawls, stumbles, advances, retreats, gropes for the light switch, and once in a while makes intuitive leaps whose import is barely understood until later, if ever, by the leaper. Life seems to me an improvisation. — Jan Swafford

My gigs are built on improvisation: I go out there and I'm like the Energizer bunny. — Meat Loaf

If you go back to the roots of jazz, it was all about COLLECTIVE improvisation. — Henry Threadgill

Much of what happens in Love Always is really from overheard conversations in the Russian Tea Room. It's an improvisation of the way certain Hollywood agents think and talk to each other. — Ann Beattie

Men in public life did their best to avoid accidental events or actions from being seen as unlucky. On a famous occasion during the civil war, Caesar tripped when disembarking from a ship on the shores of Africa and fell flat on his face. With his talent for improvisation, he spread out his arms and embraced the earth as a symbol of conquest. By quick thinking he turned a terrible omen of failure into one of victory. — Anthony Everitt

I become exaggerated, and loud, and obnoxious, and full of the spirit of improvisation. That's one of the weird things about performing, I think that any performer will say the same thing when you're on stage in front of a crowd there's a certain moment when you kind of click into a trance-like state and you just kind of go with it. I love getting into that mode. It's transcendental. — Wayne White

You know what your problem is, Sasha?" Rex said. "You always want to have every little detail worked out in advance. You've got to leave some room for improvisation." "My concern, sir, is that you've given such a wide berth to improvisation that you've left no room for planning." "You — Robert Kroese

My whole life has been one big improvisation. — Clint Eastwood

To write a book about improvisation is partly a contradiction in terms. Improvisation is spontaneous. It's in the moment. — Sally Schneider

I can't speak American dog very well. There was a lot of improvisation with Uggie - like when I put the dog on the table or sometimes I follow him, sometimes he follows me. I had a lot of treats in my pocket. We worked with Omar Von Muller, the dog trainer. It was very easy because it was a big movie. — Jean Dujardin

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that. — Stanley Crouch

Improvisation has been with me since I was a kid, and, taking a selfish pleasure from that, I just thought, "What the hell. It might as well be something other people enjoy." — Jamie Lidell

In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very 'gifted' improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action. — Malcolm Gladwell

The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument. — Brian Eno

I moved to Chicago in the early 1990s and I studied improvisation there. I learned some rules that I try to apply still today: Listen. Say yes. Live in the moment. Make sure you play with people who have your back. Make big choices early and often. Don't start a scene where two people are talking about jumping out of a plane. Start the scene having already jumped. If you're scared, look into your partner's eyes - you will feel better. — Amy Poehler

There's always some room for improvisation. — Satyajit Ray

My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music. — John Zorn

The score must govern the music. It must have authority, and not merely be an arbitrary jumping-off point for improvisation. — Cornelius Cardew

Bebop and hip-hop, in so many ways, they're connected. A lot of rappers remind me so much of bebop guys in terms of improvisation, beats and rhymes. My dream is to see hip-hop incorporated in education. You've got the youth of the world in the palm of your hand. — Quincy Jones

The secret of tango is in this moment of improvisation that happens between step and step. It is to make the impossible thing possible: to dance silence. — Carlos Gavito

A disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings. — Mary Catherine Bateson

As any jazz musician knows, it takes flexibility and adaptability for improvisation to create beauty. — Doc Childre

What all my years in improvisation taught is that - if you're going to grow as a performer - you have to try some new things. You've got to be willing to take a few risks. — Jack McBrayer

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page - rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words - just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are - accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm very bad with improvisation. I hate it. — Christoph Waltz

Acting is really scary, but it's also challenging, fun, hard work. There's always an element of improvisation with every actor, even when something is really scripted. — Michael Pitt

We did very little improvisation on camera, and once in a while we did. — Peter Tork

I don't understand why people don't use improvisation, especially in comedy films, but also, for me, you get more naturalism, and that's why I like the naturalistic performances and strange rhythms and the way that people genuinely interact captured rather than sort of very mannered performances. — Alice Lowe

This Saturday? As in tomorrow Saturday? We have to give lectures in twelve hours? We're not prepared for that! I can't just pull a cyber-crimes lecture out of my ass!" He could, but it was the principle of the thing. — Abigail Roux

There are a lot of visual marks that have to be hit, and lines that need to be said in a right way - so there wasn't really any improvisation on the set when it came to the bulk of the script. — Simon Pegg

Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan. — Brian McKnight

I can put together a pretty decent meal from whatever happens to be in the refrigerator and the pantry. I like the challenge of this sort of improvisation, the rigor of limitation and sometimes having to take a risk. — Chang-rae Lee

The unexpected is our normal routine. Commander Riker — Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode Guide Team

In 1968 I ran into Steve Lacy on the street in Rome. I took out my pocket tape recorder and asked him to describe in fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation. He answered: "In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds." His answer lasted exactly fifteen seconds. — Frederic Rzewski

I like to think that we've got a plan, so let's stick to it. That said, once we've stuck to it, we're allowed as much improvisation as anyone cares to indulge themselves in. — Guy Ritchie

One interesting thing about jazz, or art in general, but jazz especially is such an individual art form in the sense that improvisation is such a big part of it, so it feels like it should be less soldiers in an army and more like free spirits melding. And yet, big band jazz has a real military side to it. — Damien Chazelle

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well. — Isaac Asimov

I feel there has to be a certain amount of improvisation as I'm writing, which means any idea or any commitment to a project is risky. It involves time; it involves gathering of material, and sometimes it just doesn't work. Sometimes it does. As I'm starting out on a project, I can't tell if it will click or not. — Joanna Scott

Style has a profound meaning to Black Americans. If we can't drive, we will invent walks and the world will envy the dexterity of our feet. If we can't have ham, we will boil chitterlings; if we are given rotten peaches, we will make cobblers; if given scraps, we will make quilts; take away our drums, and we will clap our hands. We prove the human spirit will prevail. We will take what we have to make what we need. We need confidence in our knowledge of who we are. — Nikki Giovanni

Gastronomic boredom leads to lots of unhealthy eating. If you don't make improvisation and experimentation part of your eating life, you are sure to find yourself in an eating rut. — Mireille Guiliano

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it! — Art Tatum

Most of the musicians that I'm playing with now have jazz backgrounds, so they're comfortable with improvisation. And they all know to make eye contact with me, and I'll give them some kind of sign when I think that the song's ending. Or maybe I don't even have to, because they all sort of feel it at the same time. — Larkin Grimm

Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them. — Wynton Marsalis

Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.(p.115) — Malcolm Gladwell

You don't want to OD on improvisation. — Patti Smith

I learned at a very young age that music teaches you about life. When you're in the midst of improvisation, there is no yesterday and no tomorrow - there is just the moment that you are in. In that beautiful moment, you experience your true insignificance to the rest of the universe. It is then, and only then, that you can experience your true significance. — Charlie Haden

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation. — Jan Garbarek

Life is improvisation. All of those [improv] classes were like church to me. The training had seeped into me and changed who I am. — Tina Fey

I think I'm going to venture into the futuristic, semi sci-fi love story land, but still in my style of improvisation. — Drake Doremus

Volleyball is one of the most interactive games going. It is a game of intuition, imagination, improvisation - but most of all, of reciprocity - of teamwork. There is no way to free-lance in volleyball. — Marv Dunphy

You know, when cameras are rolling, improvisation doesn't feel natural. The pressure is too great. You're on a time schedule. You've got 60 crewmen. — Albert Brooks

In a one-woman show, there must be compelling material that you adore. In both of these there are conversations with you and another character. My Second City (improvisation) background comes in very handy for accent and body posture. — Valerie Harper

Life is improvisation. — Tina Fey

They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals - but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year. — Thomas Pynchon

Here's how I learned to improvise: I played some music in the studio and I started to move. It sounds obvious, but I wonder how many people, whatever their medium, appreciate the gift of improvisation. It's your one opportunity in life to be completely free, with no responsibilities and no consequences. You don't have to be good or even interesting. It's you alone, with no one watching or judging. If anything comes of it, you decide whether the world gets to see it. In essence, you are giving yourself permission to daydream during working hours. — Twyla Tharp

Preparing to improvise is at a level commensurate with mastering the structure in a European classical piece. Another way to define improvisation is spontaneous melody. In order to improvise, a player first needs to have memorized and analyzed the harmonic structure of so many pieces. — Jimmy Heath

Every night was improv. — Kliph Nesteroff

As a director and an actor, I encourage improvisation but in character and in the moment of what it is. — Billy Crystal

Still less, despite appearances, will it have been a collection of three "essays" whose itinerary it would be time, after the fact, to recognize; whose continuity and underlying laws could now be pointed out; indeed, whose overall concept or meaning could at last, with all the insistence required on such occasions, be squarely set forth. I will not feign, according to the code, either premeditation or improvisation. These texts are assembled otherwise; it is not my intention here to present them. — Jacques Derrida

Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?' — Simon McBurney

Give two cooks the same ingredients and the same recipe; it is fascinating to observe how, like handwriting, their results differ. After you cook a dish repeatedly, you begin to understand it. Then you can reinvent it a bit and make it yours. A written recipe can be useful, but sometimes the notes scribbled in the margin are the key to a superlative rendition. Each new version may inspire improvisation based on fresh understanding. It doesn't have to be as dramatic as all that, but such exciting minor epiphanies keep cooking lively. — David Tanis

Having been an actor, I always want to leave room for the actors to find their comfort zone, so I don't like to be too rigid in how I plan my shots. It's different if you have weeks to rehearse and you can rehearse on your sets or in your locations and you can plan that out with your actors, but in modern independent filmmaking, you don't really have that time. You have to have a certain level of improvisation. — Eric Balfour

In so far as I listen with interest to a record, it's usually to figure out how it was arrived at. The musical end product is where interest starts to flag. It's a bit like jigsaw puzzles. Emptied out of the box, there's a heap of pieces, all shapes, sizes and colours, in themselves attractive and could add up to anything
intriguing. Figuring out how to put them together can be interesting, but what you finish up with as often as not is a picture of unsurpassed banality. Music's like that."
From "Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation" by Ben Watson, Verso, London, 2004, p. 440. — Derek Bailey

Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art. — Russell Lynes

The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear. — Paul Merton

I'm going to break one of the rules of the trade here. I'm going to tell you some of the secrets of improvisation. Just remember - it's always a good idea to follow the directions exactly the first time you try a recipe. But from then on, you're on your own. — James Beard

In improvisation, there are no mistakes. — Miles Davis

In improvisation, there is only one time. This is what computer people call real time. The time of inspiration, the time of technically structuring and realizing ... the time of playing it, and the time of communicating with the audience, are all one. — Stephen Nachmanovitch

When you planned rough, you allowed room for improvisation. — Stephen King

I think improvisation is a technique and a tool. I think that even the best of them fail most of the time, and in the end, the audience is not interested in how you got there but in what you're saying. The more clearly and concisely and artistically you say it, the more effective it is. — Bernard Sahlins

Through its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks the melody of nature amid the noise of the dictionary, then, picking it out like picking out a tune, it gives itself up to improvisation on that theme. — Boris Pasternak

With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive. — Carrie Brownstein

Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere. — Mary Catherine Bateson

In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds. — Steve Lacy

I grew up in the theater, and you can't improvise Shakespeare and Ibsen. You have to speak the language. But obviously, in a contemporary film, there's often room for improvisation and spontaneous things that happen. As long as I know what I'm trying to achieve in the scene, and when something comes up, I know that the response is genuine, I'm comfortable. That's really how I build everything. — Victor Garber

Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone-beginners, children, and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is available. Its accessibility to the performer is, in fact, something which appears to offend both its supporters and detractors ... And as regards method, the improvisor employs the oldest in music-making ... Mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation. — Derek Bailey

Finding your ensemble is a crucial step toward finding joy. When you help draw out and support other members of your ensemble, they are proud to lift you up in return. Support allows us to take risks. Raise everyone up. Let others help you. It is impossible to discover the full extent of yourself by yourself. — Amy Lisewski

I'm not a standup. I didn't start off as a writer, I learned to write through improvisation, and so that's the part of the show that can most surprise me. The written part of the show, I know I can get wrong. You can't really get the interview "wrong." — Stephen Colbert

The transformation of the impossible into reality is always the mark of a demonic will. The only way to recognize a military genius is by the fact that, during the war, he will mock the rules of warfare and will employ creative improvisation instead of tested methods and he will do so at the right moment. — Stefan Zweig

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway. — Emma Thompson

Improvisation has to do with exploring something like two brothers in a room together. You find out things about situations by discovering the things that they aren't saying. It's a way to explore scenes. Sometimes it's more useful than others, but it's always there to see if there's anything that you might improve. — Mike Nichols

One more nice thing about short stories is that you can create a story out of the smallest details -an idea that springs up in your mind, a word, an image, whatever. In most cases it's like jazz improvisation, with the story taking me where it wants to. And another good point is that with short stories you don't have to worry about failing. If the idea doesn't work out the way you hoped it would, you just shrug your shoulders and tell yourself that they can't all be winners. Even with masters of the genre like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver -even Anton Chekhov- not every short story is a masterpiece. I find this a great comfort. You can learn from your mistakes (in other words, those you can't call complete success) and use that in the next story you write. — Haruki Murakami

Improvisation has never been my strong point. — Scarlett Johansson

Bold choices require risk-taking. Let your ideas out to play. Make bold choices, sticking to your point of view, and letting go of the things that do not serve you. — Amy Lisewski