Quotes & Sayings About Improvise

For years, a motto often repeated in the Canadian Armed Forces was "Improvise. Adapt. Overcome." This was a fancy way of saying we should make do with whatever tools we were given." p. 119 — Jody Mitic

More of me comes out when I improvise. — Edward Hopper

Fangs out? Check. Claws sharp? Check. Plan? Plan? What plan? I'm making this up as I go. — Garon Whited

Ladies like improv stilts, and I think men like improv giant cocks. But one of the great things about improv is that you get to play some roles you'd never get to play otherwise, you know, like the old Italian pizza-maker who's passing on the business down to his son. You get to play it all when you improvise. — Amy Poehler

I improvise therefore I exist! — Ljupka Cvetanova

Entrepreneurs typically start on a path they do not see as risky at all, then something happens that upsets their expectations and, being too far into their projects to turn back, they are forced to improvise. Those who get over this hump, or mountain, of unexpected trouble are the surviving entrepreneurial successes. — Robert E. Litan

You criticize, I improvise. — Toba Beta

I love to improvise when it's appropriate and encouraged by a producer. — Rob Paulsen

Like: 'Don't walk out there with one hand in your pocket unless there's somethin' in there you're going to bring out.' You gotta commit. You've gotta go out there and improvise and you've gotta be completely unafraid to die. You've got to be able to take a chance to die. And you have to die lots. You have to die all the time. — Bill Murray

I'm not a real musician. If you give me a bass guitar and you ask me to improvise something, or even be with some musicians and follow them, I wouldn't be able to do it. And I want to change that. I want to be able to be in a group and take my guitar and play with them, without someone showing me, "Okay, you're going to do this and that," because music has always been a big part of my life. — Marion Cotillard

Rachel knew what she was doing. And when she didn't, she could improvise on the fly, coming up with options that left a lot of collateral damage but usually only hurt herself, not the people around her. It was one of the things he would never admit that he admired about her. — Kim Harrison

So while you're trying to improvise, you're also trying to puppeteer, you're doing everything that you need to do to perform a puppet in our style, for a camera. — Brian Henson

I've seen some movies where people improvise and will say some bizarre phrase they had heard the other day, and unless it's coming directly from character and the moment they're experiencing and driving the movie forward, then it's always welcome. — Scot Armstrong

Travel compels you to discover your spiritual side by elimination: Without all the rituals, routines and possessions that give your life meaning at home, you're forced to look for meaning within yourself Indeed, if travel is a process that helps you 'find yourself', it's because it leaves you with nothing to hide behind - it yanks you out from the realm of rehearsed responses and dull comforts, and forces you into the present. Here, in the fleeting moment, you are left to improvise, to come to terms with your raw, true self. — Rolf Potts

Stop thinking. Son't hesitate. Act. The mantra has served her tolerably so far. Looking into the future would improvise her if she allowed it. — Stephen Lloyd Jones

Who the hell do you think you're, Kiddo?
I don't do thinking, Sir. I simply improvise. — Toba Beta

The importance is getting to something truthful and in that moment can only be in that moment. I don't like to use the word "improvise," but it's a continual writing of the film. — Abdellatif Kechiche

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

But I also think that the more you reason collectively about what the project should be at the beginning of the process, the more you can improvise later. — Walter Salles

Most people learn to improvise on their own, listening to records, endless hours of noodling on their instrument in the bedroom with all their spare time. That's traditionally how people learn. — Gary Burton

A puppet that starts to improvise badly is almost funnier than the puppet that's improvising well. So the show gets better when the improvising is really good, but also the show can also sometimes get better when the improvising sort of goes a little wrong and that's sort of a blessing to improvising with puppets. — Brian Henson

You can't fully prepare. You do your best to acquire diverse skills. You try to learn from your successes and mistakes over the years. You try to assemble a team with varied talents and expertise. Mostly, you strive to stay calm enough to think clearly even under extreme pressure. You try to use the adrenaline for focus rather than panic. You stay on your toes, ready to improvise. And you hope for the best. — Brandon Mull

We want to connect all these musical worlds together. We just improvise; we know straight away if its going to work or not. They're not covers - I hate the word cover. We do a transcription: mix it up, put our own spin on it. I think people will be surprised how powerful our show is. — Luka Sulic

My method of writing is to take the most basic kind of line and improvise on it. After all, I am the child of the culture which created Jazz. — Leon Forrest

I went to theater school, and if I spent time with one school of thought in this whole acting game, it's the Meisner approach of improvise-based acting. This does not mean that you improvise your acting, but that you focus on the other person. — Mackenzie Davis

I've been called a funny person, for a long time. I don't know that I know anything about comedic acting. I'm not a good improver, which is what a lot of comedic actors are really good at. I have failed miserably when I've been asked to improvise. — John Cho

The 'Being Human' people were really cool and let me improvise. They had such a good working atmosphere. It was a cool set-up and a really good environment to be in. — Craig Roberts

I don't write any of my material down. I like to improvise and be spontaneous. — Dane Cook

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

The stage and the live crowd taught me to think on my feet, to improvise. — Jason McCoy

My partner sometimes liked to go into the studio and improvise voice things just for fun. When I returned from England I transcribed one of her melodies, and had some of the hospice participants sing it, because they said they liked to sing. Their singing is very raw, but I'm going to use it for the final work. — Meredith Monk

For first-time vagabonders, this can be one of the hardest travel lessons to grasp, since it will seem that there are so many amazing sights and experiences to squeeze in. You must keep in mind, however, that the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time. At home, you're conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction. On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule. — Rolf Potts

Darkwing Duck and Don Karnage are the most fun to do, because they're both probably the closest to me - I kinda improvise a lot of them, kinda ad lib. — Jim Cummings

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

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script. — Sam Rockwell

In discussing the process with the actors, I made it clear to them that they could improvise but that the sum total of their improvisation needed to impart certain plot points, and schematic material. — Mike Figgis

To me, if people really want to improvise, get into classes and learn. — Jim Rash

I also think if you're an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improvise you're just a genius. If you can, you know, take a Tide commercial and you can just say one funny line that's not in the commercial they think you're a genius. — Amy Poehler

Ethnomethodology, a small but influential subfield of sociology founded by Harold Garfinkel (1967), took as its project the description of how people produce orderly social conduct. Ethnomethodologists argue that orderliness is enacted as people draw on resources in their environments, resources with which to improvise meaningful action. Action is not preordered by anything that can be reduced to theoretical principles; rather, the analyst considers specific instances of organized action, and describes those. An — Victor Kaptelinin

When I started doing improvise music in Europe, in the beginning I thought the way that Europeans were interpreting the reconstruction of deconstruction of this thing that we call jazz - of course it's different than what Americans do, because Europeans have a different history, a different sensibility and so forth - the nature of the creative process itself it's the same; but what comes from that creative process is different, because you have a different history, you have a different society, different language. — Hamid Drake

I think you never want to have to go into the scene having to improvise; you want to make sure its working on the page. But I do like to have the ability to try stuff just in the moment, to give it some sort of spontaneity. — Ben Stiller

I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival. — August Wilson

Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I'm in good form, I'm like somebody half sleeping. I even forget there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like priests; they are thinking only of their god. — Stephane Grappelli

Without a band, I'm much more free to improvise. — Jewel

That makes classical music work, the ability to improvise. — Itzhak Perlman

I like routine. It enables me to improvise. — James Nares

Speak to me ... be eloquent, be brilliant for me. Improvise! Rhapsodize! ... I ask for cream and you give me milk and water ... Please gather your dreams together into words. - Roxanne, Cyrano de Bergerac — Edmond Rostand

I would have liked to know what Emily Post had to recommend in a situation like this, but as Miss Post wasn't present, I was forced to improvise. — Diana Gabaldon

I'm very open and never write what I'm going to say. Speeches bore everybody else. I have to freestyle. Every time, from one program to another, everything changes and I improvise. — Marjane Satrapi

On 'Scrubs,' I played a very unusual character who pretty much was defined by saying and doing strange things, so it was easy to improvise around that. — Neil Flynn

The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world. — Annie Dillard

When you are shooting with a robot you can't improvise. You can't really ... the script is kind of the script. — Jake Schreier

There are jokes I know I want to tell, and there's sort of a rough order, but usually I try to change it up every show, to improvise and talk with the audience. I think when you tell jokes, if you're not careful, you can end up telling the whole list of jokes and then that's it. And that can get a little boring. — Demetri Martin

That's the beauty of music. You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz. — Dave Brubeck

Like most things, sex got better with age until one hit a certain plateau, and then it was like breakfast, unlikely to change unless one ran out of milk and was forced to improvise. — Emma Straub

I wrote my book 'The Amorous Busboy Of Decatur Avenue' completely like a writer does, writing it down, re-writing everything. But in my stand-up, I improvise initially, never questioning it too closely. — Robert Klein

To fight adversity, to improvise, to solve problems, and to save the coup, I had gathered all my senses into unusual configurations, which made me grow wild and enhanced my perceptions. — Philippe Petit

We don't like checklists. They can be painstaking. They're not much fun. But I don't think the issue here is mere laziness. There's something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us - those we aspire to be - handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating. — Atul Gawande

Cupcakes The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They're cooks, not chefs. A cook follows a recipe. A chef invents one. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs. — Seth Godin

Acting is like music and you improvise. It's like jazz, there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's not a plan. You practice to music and you just play it. — Denzel Washington

When I graduated from college, I moved to New York and started doing improv because I read all about the early 'Saturday Night Live' guys having come through Second City and learning how to improvise, so I wanted to get immediately into that. — Andy Daly

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

It's rare that I've read a script where I'm like, "Oh, my god, it's hilarious!" All you want is a good skeleton and good characters. Then, you can go, "Okay, I can bring a lot to this. I can improvise and I can create something out of this." — Nick Swardson

top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more democratic the cooperation tends to become. — David Graeber

I love improv so much. Listening. I think that's the key. When you improvise, you put a lot of pressure on yourself to create, and to be generating information, and trying to be funny, but if you just listen to what's being said to you, and then react honestly, you generally get better results. — Rob Riggle

So what's the plan?" Ben asked.
"Go inside. Look around. Improvise."
"Brilliant." Hi stroked his chin. "Quick question: Is having no plan the same as having a terrible plan, or are those different categories? — Kathy Reichs

It might seem a contradiction but... the ability to improvise requires lots of practice. Ask any jazz musician. — Ted Agon

Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is - or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live. — Jostein Gaarder

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

The music is something outside myself that's also inside myself ... Music and a sense of another presence always went hand in hand. Even when I was three, I would improvise music, and my maternal grandfather would act as an audience and used to applaud. I would imitate things like thunder and rain. — John Tavener

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. — Sylvia Plath

Ralph Fiennes was a big hero of mine acting-wise growing up and while I was training. I just find him so watchable. He was playing this very intimidating character when we worked together and it certainly felt like he was in character off set as well! He was very cool. Before a scene, he'd be like, "Come on. Let's improvise. Let's just do stuff." But Jesus Christ. He's Ralph Fiennes! — Jeremy Irvine

When we first started playing we did a lot of rehearsing. We used to write out everything. In fact, that's the way everybody rehearses: we play the tunes and improvise. — Charlie Haden

I may film scenes I had no intention of filming; things suggest themselves on location, and we improvise. I try not to think about it too much. Then, in the cutting room, I take the film and start to put it together, and only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is about. — Michelangelo Antonioni

As I got more confident, I was able to let actors improvise, and do long takes. It's 10%, 5% you learn and experience. The rest you just have or you don't have. — Woody Allen

I was so intimidated by the thought of improvising back in the '80s when I was in Chicago. I think the opportunity only even came up once that I can recall, and I turned down the offer. It was to go improvise in some club in the suburbs or something. Good God, I couldn't think of anything more frightening than to get up there without a plan. — Neil Flynn

I probably have the most fun on projects where there's some room to improvise. — Andy Daly

Life is a lot like jazz - it's best when you improvise. — George Gershwin

I like to improvise. — Iris Apfel

If I do a bit on stage, I prepare too much. Those bits are all really, really carefully written, and overwritten, and researched. I really don't feel like I can wing it. So I write it out word for word, and when I'm onstage I'll improvise around it. — Andy Daly

When it comes to certain kind of rhythm things, particularly like shaker or tambourine tracks. I like the way I can really lock up with my own Hi Hat or Ride Cymbal beat. So a lot of times in recording I'll be asked
or even volunteer
to put a shaker or tambourine track on. Just to give it something extra. And it always works great. I hate it when I'm in the studio and I don't have any shakers or tambourines with me. I've been on a few dates when we didn't have anything and tried to improvise shakers out of some uncooked rice in soda cans. It sounded horrible. — Peter Erskine

We all grew up, those of us who took On the Road to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn't run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America ... — Sarah Vowell

Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step. — Karl Lagerfeld

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

If I'm doing comedy, I try to improvise a lot. Even if they don't use it, it helps me loosen up and figure out the character. — Zach Woods

I have a house, I try to spend as little time in it as possible. Not always easy on the mind and body, but it's how I got myself to 80-plus countries. This kind of routine forces one to reinvent and improvise. The older I get, the more important this is to me. — Henry Rollins

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right. — Richard Dawkins

Moral life becomes a jam session in which at any time I may improvise for myself rather than play the notes in the score. — J.I. Packer

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise. — Mark Steyn

If you improvise a riff and the crowd immediately reacts to it, you know you're on to something. — Dimebag Darrell

I use a Bruce Lee technique: 'The way of no way.' He had the idea that he would learn everything, so that whoever he had to fight, he could improvise anything. The best way of starting a gig is just to not think of anything - to clear your mind, not in an empty Zen state, but more just to go on and see where you go. — Eddie Izzard

I was a dancer of no repute. But dance taught me a lot. You walk into a dance studio knowing you have to walk out with a dance. You improvise. — Dan Phillips

It's not that bad things never happen. But there's a pattern in which most people are calm, resourceful, altruistic, and they improvise emergency systems that work really well - whether it's getting the babies out of a collapsed hospital or putting together a community kitchen to feed everybody for the next few months. — Rebecca Solnit

I am an improviser, ... I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised. — Joe Zawinul

I improvise whenever I feel it's important, or whenever I think that something's there. It's nice to have a script that's so well-written that I don't have to improvise. I mean, I used to have to re-write whole movies; this is kind of nice. — Bill Murray

When you improvise, you work off the laughs from the audience, but when you step on stage to do standup, it's silent. — Aubrey Plaza

When you don't have much money, you get creative. There's so much money that gets wasted on big movie sets. But when you don't have much money, you improvise. — Michael Jai White

Most things I get hired on, I get hired because I improvise something funny, or they just think I look weird. — T. J. Miller

You don't improvise with a Cameron Crowe script. — Orlando Bloom

With Altman, he does discuss everything with you, but then leaves you to it and gives you full rein and lets you improvise and create a character while the camera is rolling. — Vincent D'Onofrio