Improvising Quotes & Sayings

I knew I was going to be composing. It all makes sense in retrospect. But you don't know while you're in the process of improvising your life. — William Bolcom

I did a smaller gig with an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. In one song, something wrong happened with the drum machine. I tried to cover up the mistake by playing faster and improvising a new song but it became crazy, and I had to admit it was all a mess. — Violante Placido

The old dictum is that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy," and the special-ops team is already regrouping and improvising a new plan. He hears the sharp, disciplined fire — Don Winslow

I improvise therefore I exist! — Ljupka Cvetanova

Shamanic healing is a journey. It involves stepping out of our habitual roles, our conventional scripts, and improvising a dancing path. — Gabrielle Roth

The Chili Peppers do a lot of improvising, but it's within the framework of song structures. The Meatbats is from a purely instrumental standpoint. But when you hear the term 'instrumental music' you think it's real serious stuff and everybody's playing a million notes and it's about playing fast. That's not what we do. — Chad Smith

The planet isn't improvising, it's creating dynamic tensions between complex living systems in a planetary choreography, a balancing act between physical, chemical, biological, environmental, and human components. — DJ Spooky

There's something very edgy about Bill Murray out there improvising. — Harold Ramis

You have to be loose enough so that when you listen to what's coming, you can follow it. In that sense I am improvising, but I don't think I'm experimenting. I have a problem with the whole term "experimental music." — Z'EV

When you're improvising, it's fun to find something that you can lean on that is similar to your life experience. In my opinion, that's very helpful. — Mark Duplass

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with. — John Ratzenberger

Sometimes you'll have great actors who aren't comfortable with improvising. Which can get pretty frustrating. But every actor's coming from a different place and they have their own strengths and weaknesses and your job is to sell them as two people in the same world. Some of them have to have their hands held and some I just let loose entirely. — David Gordon Green

Sometimes I'll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I'll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story in it, I'll try and tease it out and figure out where the story is going. — John Darnielle

The key to writing for Richard (Pryor) was to just push his buttons and then know when to push the buttons on your cassette recorder. You'd get him started, then surreptitiously start recording when he got inspired and started walking around the room and improvising in character. Then you'd get it all transcribed and take credit for it. — Alan Thicke

I was always playing the Hammond Organ back to front even during the days of the Nice, going back to 1968. Really what I was doing there, was choosing notes at random and trying to make some sense of them, improvising back to front. — Keith Emerson

No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale. — Honore De Balzac

I look at improvising as a prolonged game of chess. There's an opening gambit with your pawn in a complex game I have with one character, and lots of side games with other characters, and another game with myself - and in each game you make all these tiny, tiny moves that get you to the endgame. — Steve Carell

I found the recording sessions very freeing because you can really try things. When you're filming something, if you're improvising a film and you're wasting film and wasting a cameraman's time. — Tina Fey

I can't imagine doing anything without being an improviser. I can't imagine trying to write or act or direct without what improvising offers you. — Marc Evan Jackson

That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action. — Twyla Tharp

I write and rewrite and memorize, and then inject my performance with improvising and spontaneity, because if something feels too rehearsed, it's not going to be fun. — Andy Daly

If you're too hung up on improvising 'correctly', you will almost always fail. — Craig Cackowski

I know there are some actors who are just brilliant at improvising and brilliant at just being in the moment and doing it there and then. I'm not one of those actors. — Ioan Gruffudd

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

Where is this conversation going?" Because she wanted to finish it, strip him naked, and finally get him where she'd always wanted him. Oddly, a heart shaped bed was never in her fantasies, but she was okay with improvising. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

It was a shock to my system leaving 'The West Wing' and going to 'Psych.' I remember being like, 'What are you doing?' when James Roday first started improvising. Steve and the writing staff write it that way. They leave gaps. — Dule Hill

If you do improvising, it can sometimes end up being a waste of time. And if you do that, it's more or less based on a writing process. — Giovanni Ribisi

Improvising political dialogue is not easy. — James Nesbitt

When I did The X-Files, there was certainly less of that because the script was as it was and it was such a wonderful script and it was quite complex and there wasn't a hell of a lot of improvising I could do to bring to the table, but I guess what I did bring was a sense of self and that the reason I was cast was because I did come across as someone who possibly was only human for a short time. — Rhys Darby

I find myself improvising a lot. But, sometimes I'll come us with a chorus or just one line and it will sort of hang out for a long time before it get's flushed out into a real living song ... — Kate Brown

I haven't written a novel or something that long, because I really am improvising all along and the story is growing new limbs to do what it needs to do. So there's very little planning. There's a little planning where I say, "Well, it looks like I'm going in this direction, ok, good." But there's very little forethought or intellectual justification: "Oh, look, I'm putting in a theme park because that represents dystopian America!" — George Saunders

When I'm on stage, it's a little world I've created where I'm sort of the thing, so I have total control over everything that happens. When we're improvising, I'm with someone I totally trust. I know things are going to work out. I don't have those guarantees in life. There are no consequences on stage. — Colin Mochrie

Certainly one of the more common experiences in the jazz field is discovering someone new. Improvising musicians are capable of being musical travelers, voyagers. We want to join in on whatever we hear. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape. — Gary Burton

Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. That's a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising. — Christopher Walken

I remember as a kid, I was improvising and making little trophies out of different materials and going in front of the mirror, lifting the trophies and saying 'Nole was the champion!' — Novak Djokovic

I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions. — Terry Riley

I love food and am very good at improvising when preparing it - it's a really creative experience for me. — Autumn Reeser

I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from improvising jazz. Something which seems to me remarkable is how unconscious the creative process is. You encounter a problem, but can't solve it. — Oliver Sacks

Yeah, improvising only really works 100% when you're with somebody. — Bill Hader

When I got this saxophone, it became a religion. There wasn't TV, there wasn't much money, and there was just a real dedication ... I never thought of it as an art. It was just work that I loved. Not just work, but work that I loved. I loved it so much, I would play it if nobody listened to it. Any jazz musician, if there's nobody around to listen, would play just for the sheer joy of improvising music. — Stan Getz

In the U.S., it's like, you start with a great script, and then on set - not everybody, but definitely in the Apatow group - you go off, and you're improvising on camera. So while you're on camera, you're saying things that no one else has ever heard before during the actual take. — Bill Hader

Improvising, I participated in the discussion, and questioned another woman in the group. I asked her how old she was and she answered, "Thirty." I replied, "No, you are not thirty but instead eighty and lying on your deathbed. And now you are looking back on your life, a life which was childless but full of financial success and social prestige." And then I invited her to imagine what she would feel in this situation. "What will you think of it? What will you say to yourself?" Let me quote what she actually said from a tape which was recorded during that session. "Oh, I married a millionaire, I had an easy life full of wealth, and I lived it up! I flirted with men; I teased them! But now I am eighty; I have no children of my own. Looking back as an old woman, I cannot see what all that was for; actually, I must say, my life was a failure! — Viktor E. Frankl

Nooooooooooo!" Screaming the word, Amy and Dan moved as one.
Time slowed down, which, Dan knew from experience, often happened when you were in midair. By the time they leaped onto the hood of Fiske's car (oops, dents), and Dan had ripped off a windshield wiper to use as a weapon (probably not the best idea, but hey, he was improvising), Scarey Harley Dude had turned around.
He strode off in his motorcycle boots, moving swiftly to his bike without seeming to hurry. His helmet back on, sunglasses adjusted, he roared off straight into the road, weaving through the thick traffic like smoke.
Amy's face was squashed against the windshield. Dan held the wiper aloft like a club.
And Evan Tolliver stood on the sidewalk, blinking at them.
Dan waved the windshield wiper at him. "Hey, bro. We didn't want to miss our ride. — Jude Watson

I wouldn't want the pressure of a Six Feet Under or the pressure of improvising like Curb Your Enthusiasm. — Robert Englund

I love improvising. — Lasse Hallstrom

In many ways, I think it's easier in some ways, or it's more entertaining or more guaranteed to be entertaining than traditional improvising. Again, because you're not just you in your body. — Brian Henson

Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This is the greatest insult you can offer to Art. — Robert Schumann

That seduction or initiation into evil can be understood by recognizing that most actors are not solitary figures improvising on the empty stage of life. Rather, they are often an ensemble of different players, on a stage with various props and changing costumes, scripts, and stage directions from producers and directors. — Philip G. Zimbardo

I don't mind doing scripted material. It's actually kind of a relief, because improvising is a little bit like screenwriting on your feet. — John C. Reilly

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea — W.B.Yeats

I've never been good at improvising. — Terry Jones

I don't want to see an experiment. Experiment at home - when you show up on stage, I want to see a result. I think a lot of improvisers, you'll see them some nights and they just stink, and they go, "Well, we're just improvising." Like that's a license to have a shitty night! — Z'EV

For me to call myself a musician, it's necessary to play live, and it rewards so much - not just in the pay cheque sense but what it does for my playing. I feel it through a tour - I feel it at the end of a tour - all that I've gathered, and especially now that I am improvising so much. — Neil Peart

In my case, I am improvising with existing sound files. I use an MSP patch that a friend of mine made, and you have to improvise when you use this patch. I don't use a guitar in performance anymore. — Christian Fennesz

If you have a child, you're improvising with rules all day long, and some of them are total lies. — Sarah Jessica Parker

Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I'd known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we're always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we're doing things we technically don't know how to do. — Ben Fountain

The upshot of all this is that we become competent, which is the most important quality to have if you're an astronaut - or, frankly, anyone, anywhere, who is striving to succeed at anything at all. Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when every second counts. It encompasses ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything. — Chris Hadfield

We're improvising a lot of this, which amazes people. — Tom Bergeron

When I worked with Robin Williams, now there is improv! He is just as funny as you think he is. We did at least five or six takes of every scene, improvising every scene differently. He was a riot. — Stephen Root

I'm trying to be expressive on my instrument and conduct as I'm improvising. So I'm conducting with the melodies and the rhythms that I play. And so it's a very organic way. It's a lot like Charles Mingus played, cuing people in from what you play and how you play it rather than standing in front of a band, conducting and pointing. — Joe Lovano

As much as I think John Coltrane belongs on the list, I think without Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, both of whom defined improvising on the tenor sax, there would not have been the evolution of the craft by John Coltrane. — Herbie Mann

Every day, you have to make three hours of music, just randomly improvising, and that's a great way to weed stuff out. — Caroline Shaw

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure. — Lauren Lapkus

In life, sometimes everything falls into place, and sometimes everything just falls to pieces. The key is to begin creating with these fallen pieces. By improvising, you'll create something magical that might be the best thing you've ever accomplished — Tori Amos

No goal is impossible. Some things simply take more effort, more time, and more improvising that others. — T.C. McMullen

While you're improvising, you may come up with something which will break him up. As soon as that smile comes out, you know that, hey, we're having fun. — Shelley Berman

My younger brother and I have been writing together, mainly for fun, for years, but we've been improvising together since we were kids. Literally. — Ty Burrell

When we were making Speaking in Tongues and Remain in Light, we were jamming. From that we were taking the best bits and then recording and improvising on top of those. — Tina Weymouth

I was improvising before I was reading music. I was just trying to play things on the clarinet by ear. I think my ear is one of my greatest assets. — Pete Fountain

The main thing about improvising is listening so if something happens that wasn't expected and you know your character, you know what has to happen in this scene, you can react to that in a way that's honest and it might take you in a different direction to go to the same place. — Vince Vaughn

When I'm in the studio, when I'm warm, when I'm what people call improvising, I feel a very special connection. I feel the most right. I don't want to become too mystic about this, but things feel as though they're in the best order at that particular moment. — Twyla Tharp

Boxing is a lot of preparation and then improvising, so there are parallels to being an actor. — Seth Numrich

The Beatles came and everybody forgot about everything else. That was a friendly, together, hip interpersonal music, introducing electric sustain, and it captured the imagination of everybody. So improvising, even though it was in a very rich period in terms of impact on the public, the '6Os were very hard times on players financially. — Paul Bley

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising. — Barbara Januszkiewicz

Normally when I'm writing, in the beginning I don't think of lyrics at all. I'm just improvising. — St. Lucia

A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef's book about improvising but a real home cook's book with a real home cook's pantry, supermarket ingredients, that sort of thing. — Sally Schneider

Our domestic lives reflect the major trend that dominates the consumer marketplace today: an ever-increasing emphasis on variety and choice ... we find ourselves inventing our lives as we go along, improvising in an effort to take advantage of the bewildering range of choices that we face. — Sally Helgesen

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 do a little improv in my shows. Kind of like our movie, I'll do beats and ideas of dialogue, but I think there's less pressure because it's a live show. If you mess up, the audience laughs because we don't really know what we're doing. But as far as shooting, that was very scary, trying to make a point and drive the film. It definitely helped improvising. — Charlyne Yi

John Cassavetes was there at night while I was working. After they [with his friends] discussed as much live TV as they felt they needed to, they started improvising scenes just for the fun of it and one of those scenes everybody got very interested in and it turned into Shadows [1959]. That movie was entirely improvised. — Gena Rowlands

I am improvising a brassiere," I said with dignity. "I don't mean to ride sidesaddle through the mountains wearing a dress, and if I'm not wearing stays, I don't mean my breasts to be joggling all the way, either. Most uncomfortable, joggling." "I daresay." He edged into the room and circled me at a cautious distance, eyeing my nether limbs with interest. "And what are those?" "Like them?" I put my hands on my hips, modeling the drawstring leather trousers that Phaedre had constructed for me - laughing hysterically as she did so - from soft buckskin provided by one of Myers's friends in Cross Creek. "No," he said bluntly. "Ye canna be going about in - in - " He waved at them, speechless. "Trousers," I said. "And of course I can. I wore trousers all the time, back in Boston. They're very practical." He — Diana Gabaldon

I think initially it's terrifying because going into a show where, you know, "Oh, I'm going to be on stage for two hours, I have no lines to memorize, I have nothing really prepared," and actually I say that, the show is not all improvising. — Brian Henson

I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least. — Mose Allison

The 12 years that I was improvising are why I got the number of commercials I got when I was in New York and why I got 'The Devil Wears Prada,' and it's why I even got in the door for 'Mad Men.' — Rich Sommer

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

Wherever inspiration comes from, it's like I'll hear a melody and chords, almost a rough structure of the whole thing [song]. I'll just hear it and chase what's in my head. The rest comes from jamming with band, improvising, seeing what comes up as well. I'll come up with it off the top of my head, catch it, sing and hum, and if something is missing, just jam, and that's the [songwriting] process. — Chris Wyse

If you're onstage and you're improvising and nothing's happening, people are racing for the door. But the director can go shopping later and pick up pieces and moments and insert them. — Gary Cole

The idea of just improvising and riffing can sometimes be at the expense of story. — Jim Rash

My favorite dish is cleaning out the fridge on Sunday night and improvising a great medley. — Matthew McConaughey

I don't like improvising on camera, particularly, but very often, a scene will not be working, and you rehearse it once or twice, and you realize something's missing. So I'll play with it until it makes sense. — Alan Arkin

Improvising things is always changing. A lot of momentum. — Ikue Mori

When I do the roles, when I'm in the room and auditioning, I'll ask the director if they're cool with me adding stuff, or just improvising while we're doing it. And I would say, like, 90 percent of the time, they say, 'Absolutely.' — Ben Schwartz

The challenge is, well, there's a huge challenge, which is when you're improvising, you're meant to sort of clear your mind completely, just be open and funny, and paying, you know, paying attention. — Brian Henson

Ah, you coward! Look at you, running." "Actually, it's called improvising. — Jonathan Stroud

If the same phrase in the same place created the right effect, I was perfectly prepared to use it every time. I wasn't worried that I wasn't improvising. — Alexis Korner

I end up improvising in almost everything to some degree, 'cause it's often necessary on movies. The script is one thing, and it's this kind of theory of what you're going to do, and then you get there on the day and you realize, "Oh, the script is not appropriate to this room, the door's over here." — John C. Reilly

I think everybody came into it with the understanding that they would go through an experience that is literally not by the book, that is not executing the script and then going home, but living and breathing these characters and being in the moment with each other, and improvising and creating a lot of present-tense intensity between characters. — Oren Moverman

These actors like Danny McBride and Jonah Hill are so good at improvising, and when they do it, it's this fun moment for the audience. It makes them feel like they're watching something fresh and new. — Jillian Bell

I think that if you're improvising on TV, it's a great way to help the dialogue between actors and writers. — Zach Woods

I'm by no means a pianist. I think that's safe to say, but the piano, for me, I would say it's the enabler. It gave me what I needed and gives me what I need in order to write a song. And I think playing or improvising on the piano is where I feel most liberated and sort of less conscious of all my insecurities or inadequacies. — Laura Mvula