Improvisational Quotes & Sayings

A lot of it is found in the editing room and part of that is due to some of the improvisational tactics we employ on set. Part of it is that the shot goes a little bit long and they end up coming down to fit time. — Mark Duplass

She longed for porch friendship, for the sticky, hot sensation of familiar female legs thrown over hers in companionship. She pined for the girliness of it all, the unplanned, improvisational laziness. She wanted to soak the words 'time management' out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down the unchartered beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell. — Rebecca Wells

Louis Armstrong was the primary contributor to jazz music in the 20th century. His improvisational skills served as the principal model for all who came after him, regardless of one's chosen instrument. — Ellis Marsalis Jr.

Once I had defined myself as a compositional drummer, I thought, "Well, I want to be an improvisational drummer." — Neil Peart

No event for the Koyukon - or for most other indigenous peoples - is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely predetermined or fated. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an articulate and improvisational field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words. — David Abram

And it occurred to me that in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don't in fact communicate so much as leave messages for one another, these odd improvisational performances, often sorry bits and samplings of ourselves that can't help but seem out of context. And then when you do finally reach someone, everyone's so out of practice or too hopeful or else embittered that you wonder if it would be better not to attempt contact at all. — Chang-rae Lee

I used to be a lot more engaged on an improvisational level than other people. I was always on tour and always had a guitar in my hands, and when I went back home, my battery was at full charge. I had a lot of energy to get off, just impulses that I could draw upon. — Bradford Cox

Parenthood is harder than conventional work, the author suggests, because our jobs develop a somewhat predictable flow and offer relatively short-term feedback. This leads to internal comparisons to the improvisational nature of parenting — Jennifer Senior

I think if my daughter was interested in acting, I would find ways for her to act in theater that has to do with her school or a kids' improvisational thing. There are ways to do it where you're not on a movie set with 60 adults, which I loved at the time, but as a parent, I don't know that I'd be dying to put her in that spot. — Helen Hunt

I had seen some shows at the Groundlings [legendary L.A. improvisational and sketch comedy troupe] and thought, "If I could ever do that, that would really mean something, that I have arrived." So I went through the program and said to myself, "I'm going to stay here until they kick me out." Seriously, they can ask you to leave at any point. Luckily, they never did that to me. — Wendi McLendon-Covey

With comedy, if you write something for me, I'm better at it. I'm not sure I'm so good at improvisational stuff. — Robert Knepper

The field of asking is fundamentally improvisational. It thrives not in the creation of rules and etiquette but in the smashing of that etiquette.
Which is to say: there are no rules.
Or, rather, there are plenty of rules, but they ask, on bended knees, to be broken. — Amanda Palmer

justice must have an improvisational character if it is not to fall back into the sort of legal structure that, in spite of its intentions, can only result in the perpetuation of injustice. — Theodore Jennings

To be fair, on a good project, no matter whether it's improvised or scripted or meticulously prepared, or all up for grabs, it's always, always beyond the safety zone. Every project becomes interesting and exciting once you move beyond that routine. You always aspire to that. It's not that this improvisational mode is the only mode that facilitates that. — Christoph Waltz

Hitler's unusually improvisational and personal style of leadership, which created constant responsibility conflicts and an anarchic tangle of offices and portfolios, was anything but an expression of political incompetence. On the contrary, it served to make Hitler's own supremacy essentially unassailable. — Volker Ullrich

Improvisational things about picture-making ... learned from working with the small camera early on have served me well in being able to think quickly when making [portraits]. — Dawoud Bey

I'm not a particularly good cook. Part of it is that it is the kind of cooking anybody could do if they bothered. It's improvisational. I cook with whatever I have laying around. — Steve Albini

I come from an improvisational background so I'm used to playing. I'm used to not knowing what exactly is going to come out. — Naomi Grossman

My act is sort of improvisational. I have a skeleton in my head, but no fat or skin on it. — Paula Poundstone

'Saturday Night Live' was actually started with a show that Lorne Michaels and I did at a summer camp called Timberlane in Ontario when we were 14 and 15. We would do an improvisational show with music, comedy and acting. — Howard Shore

People know that both my parents were shrinks so I was sort of raised in an atmosphere where there was that interest in the human mechanism and the human psyche and what makes people tick. And yes, I think I'm particularly creative and adventurous and improvisational and spontaneous in my inner impulses and patterns and deeply curious and appetized in the unfathomably mysterious and delicious phenomena that is the human being and who we really are. — Jeff Goldblum

Basketball, unlike football with its prescribed routes, is an improvisational game, similar to jazz. If someone drops a note, someone else must step into the vacuum and drive the beat that sustains the team. — Phil Jackson

Certain music, jazz in particular, has the ability to make you a better citizen of the world. It helps you expand your world view and gives you more confidence in your cultural achievements. Improvisational jazz teaches you about yourself while the swing in jazz teaches you how to work with others — Wynton Marsalis

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. — Archie Shepp

Playful arising is authorized by both risk and trust in the process and in oneself. To be truly playful and improvisational one must not look for results. — Joshua L. Goldberg

I don't really have one dish. I'm a very improvisational cook. I sort of like to make things up as I go along. I'm quite creative in the kitchen. — Gugu Mbatha-Raw

The "yes" comes from my improvisational days and the opportunity that comes with youth, and the "please" comes from the wisdom of knowing that agreeing to do something usually means you aren't doing it alone. — Amy Poehler

I started off at the Second City in Chicago ... It's an improvisational theater that ostensibly does social and political satire, but when I was there, we generally didn't. We did character work, and we did just the silliest things we could think of. We weren't all that concerned with, you know, changing the world through mime. — Stephen Colbert

Craig Nelson who is an actor and is in a show called Coach in the United States. We began to do some improvisational stuff and we used to get laughs and things. — Barry Levinson

Trade book publishing is by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers. If money were their primary goal, these people would probably have chosen other careers. — Jason Epstein

When comedy is good, it's jazz. The beats of it, the looseness, the improvisational part, the music-the way you hit the inflection, the high notes of a joke. It's all melody to me. — Billy Crystal

For even more "sizzle," instead of simply leading the goats out to graze as we usually did, I raced out in front of them, hollering an improvisational goat call that made me sound like a yodeling hillbilly. I turned back toward the barn and aw that the goats had stayed back, huddled together in fear in the barn doorway. They obviously preferred to skip dinner rather than get too close to the retard scarecrow suffering a grand mal seizure.

~The Bocolic Plauge, by Josh Kilmer-Purcell (2010), P. 214-215 — Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Nobody is out to sabotage an entire script and do an improvisational experiment of a movie, but when they're feeling something in the moment, let them make it their own. That's what makes them great actors. — Dan Fogelman

My entire career has been pivoting from company to company. Some people call it lack of planning or direction, I call it flexibility and good improvisational skills. — Justin Kan

I tend to a lot of improvisational ranting, and that's fun. For me, stand-up has been, performance-wise, a really good outlet. — Michael Showalter

Ben was more improvisational, and relied less on methodology, and basically is a guitarist who switched to bass, whereas Jeff has a more traditional approach to playing bass in a band, and has a great sense of what his band sounds like, and we lock up nicely. — Matt Cameron

This is why improvisational music and comedy is so inspiring: You are seeing something being born, and that energy, there is no substitute for. These songs, most of them, are about a minute old when you hear them. — John Darnielle

Benefits of Improv To the Editor: Re "Inmate Improv," by Anna Clark (Op-Ed, Dec. 31): It was not surprising to me that an improvisational theater workshop would help a prison inmate adjust to life after his release. Pretend play has been shown to improve the executive-function skills in preschool and school-age children. These skills include the ability to control emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exercise self-control and discipline. As poor executive-function skills are associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime, it would behoove all adults involved in child-rearing to encourage role-playing or "improv." STEVEN ROSENBERG Fairfield, Conn., Dec. 31, 2014 The writer is director of the Elementary Reading Program at the University of Bridgeport School of Education. — Anonymous

Preparation is the be-all of good trial work. Everything else - felicity of expression, improvisational brilliance - is a satellite around the sun. Thorough preparation is that sun. — Louis Nizer

I think the best thing I ever did was, years before I got the 'Late Night' show, when I first got out to Los Angeles to be a television writer, the first thing I did was I signed up to take improvisational classes ... And I studied that for years, and I really loved it. — Conan O'Brien

The rough and ready improvisational quality to life on board the International Space Station is reminiscent of a long trip in a sailboat: privacy and fresh produce are in short supply, hygiene is basic, and a fair amount of the crew's time is spent just on maintaining and repairing the craft. — Chris Hadfield

Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering. — Margaret Atwood

That's why I love improvisational theater so much - you do it [scene] once and then it's done. You don't get bogged down with a lot of preplanning and repetition. If I do something and it gets a laugh, I don't want to do it again. Why bother? I'm just repeating myself. It's boring. — Amy Sedaris

It's not so much that I got that idea at some point, it came up naturally because of the improvisational nature of the story I was telling. — Chester Brown

I love to improvise, but I always thought "Man, it's like the final frontier for improvisational actors, to really go for something emotional, something that's not just chasing the laugh." — John C. Reilly

Part of this new world of completely improvisational terrorism is that there were codes of war that disintegrated in the face of terrorism. — Diane Sawyer

Chris Guest is the godfather of improvisational comedy. — Tom Bennett

If she possessed a genius - and a growing number of us think she did - it was a capacity for understanding and trusting the improvisational nature of her will. This might seem a contradictory state, and for most of us it would be. We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears. Fan was different. As we have come to realize, she was not one to hold herself back. Or to be fettered. In this way she startles us, inspires us. She was someone who pursued her project as a genuine artist might, following with focus and intensity as well as an enduring innocence a goal she could not quite yet understand or see but wholly believed. — Chang-rae Lee

As you get ready to walk out under the bright lights of the improvisational stage of the rest of your life be bold. Don't always worry about what your next line is going to be. — Dick Costolo

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive. — Steven Johnson

The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed. — Albert Murray

I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet ... So I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue. — Tom Waits

Since being diagnosed with Asperger's, I'd been working with an acting coach who has now become a good friend. We'd been trying lots of improvisational techniques to help me with some of the problems I experience. But it's a very slow process. — Paddy Considine

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life. — Amy Tan

I have a reputation for being an improvisational actor, which is true, but I also know what I'm doing so that if the improvisational strand doesn't work I can go back to what I know's already there. — Robert Carlyle

Habitus, then, is a kind of compatibilism. As a social being acting in the world, I'm not an unconstrained "free" creature "without inertia"; neither am I the passive victim of external causes and determining forces. Neither mechanical determinism nor libertarian freedom can really make sense of our being-in-the-world because our freedom is both "conditioned and conditional." Both our perception and our action are conditioned, but as conditioned, it is possible for both to be spontaneous and improvisational. I learn how to constitute my world from others, but I learn how to constitute my world. The "I" that perceives is always already a "we." My — James K.A. Smith

I do try to keep my show very improvisational. I don't work off a set list; I like to keep it more in the moment. I like to have information about where I'm going, what might be happening in that particular region as well. I like for people to feel like the show is for them. — Dane Cook

When we listen to improvisational jazz, or solo classical violinists, the way they phrase and inflect melodies feels vocal, like they're talking to us. When I was figuring out how to perform solo, I wanted to move back and forth between bass riffs, melody, and harmony, so I often used sounds instead of - or alongside - the words of a song. I found that if I sang a line using the consonants, vowels, shadings, and inflection we recognize as human language sounds, people responded as if I were talking to them. — Bobby McFerrin

I would like to have a movie under my own control sometime, and see what could be done with it. Who knows? Maybe Hollywood will make an improvisational movie someday. — Alan Arkin

In terms of creative engagement, I just love being able to produce, produce, produce. You don't always get it perfect, but it has much more of an improvisational element, and you learn. — Alex Hirsch

I hate it, it is tedious ... when I write for my act, it is very improvisational, I write bullet points, I cannot sit in front of a computer; that is not my style. — Kathy Griffin

I play classical music almost exclusively. I never mastered jazz or gospel in the way that my mother did. She was a fine improvisational musician. I pretty much have to stick to what's written on the page. — Condoleezza Rice

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened. — Archie Shepp

My father was a jazz tenor sax player. He played in a lot of big bands. So I had that sound around me all the time. The first record that really caught my ear was Clifford Brown's 'Brownie Eyes.' I grew up listening to John Coltrane and Illinois Jacquet. This is where I come from ... I love improvisational music. — Meshell Ndegeocello

If a director can find the exact combination between the written word as a guideline and improvisational input from his actors, I think that's where you'll find the most successful work being done. — Alan Thicke

If I know a guy who's a really good improvisational actor, I'd be foolish not to let him because he'll come up with goodies and all kinds of little freebies that you get. — Rob Reiner

This is the secret of success for anywhere in the world, not just the monastery," he says, and then goes on to describe pretty much word for word the first rule of improvisational comedy, or for that matter any successful collaborative enterprise. Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. "Yes ... and" rather than "No ... but. — Michael Lewis

You could pay Arthur Janov to teach you to scream about history, or you could learn prayer or a mantra, or you could write your life down and hope to make peace with it, write it down, or paint it, or turn it into improvisational theater, but that was the best you could probably do. You were stuck. — Rick Moody

What propels an embryo from one stage to the next-and makes one species different from another-is not a blueprint but rather an enormous autonomous library of the instructions contained within its genome. Each gene does double duty, specifying both a recipe for a protein and a set of regulatory conditions for when and where it should be built. Taken together suites of these IF-THEN genes give cells the power to act as parts of complicated improvisational orchestras. Like real musicians, what they play depends on both their own artistic impulses and what the other members of the orchestra are playing. As we will see in the next chapter, every bit of this process-from the Cellular Big 4 to the combination of regulatory cues-holds as much for development of the brain as it does for the body. — Gary F. Marcus

In an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person's contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that's more responsive to the changing environment. — R. Keith Sawyer

My voice is my improvisational instrument, the melody instrument. The guitar is harmonic structure. I'm not a good enough guitarist to improvise on it. — Paul Simon

The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect template. — Ronald A. Heifetz

Jam Cruise is actually a comfortable place for me. My jamming skills and my improvisational skills have improved immensely as I've gone more solo, because I've had this opportunity. — John Oates

I've been largely an improvisational actor for most of my career. — Billy Bob Thornton

He was responsible for administering an army that lacked time-tested procedures and routinized policies, so every decision became an improvisational act. — Joseph J. Ellis

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater. — Roberta Smith

Korean cinema is very improvisational, and there is a unique power that stems from this. — Bae Doona

Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting what Mount Rushmore is to animation. — John Cassavetes

When you work without a script, you are in a sense working in a much more improvisational way than when you are prepared totally. — Sydney Pollack

I converted a family-owned strip club into an improvisational acting theater. — Tommy Chong