Improvisational Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Chris Guest is the godfather of improvisational comedy.

Tom Bennett

#9. 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

#10. I converted a family-owned strip club into an improvisational acting theater.

Tommy Chong

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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.

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. I've been largely an improvisational actor for most of my career.

Billy Bob Thornton

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Once I had defined myself as a compositional drummer, I thought, "Well, I want to be an improvisational drummer."

Neil Peart

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. '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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting what Mount Rushmore is to animation.

John Cassavetes

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. Korean cinema is very improvisational, and there is a unique power that stems from this.

Bae Doona

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

Archie Shepp

#51. 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

#52. 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

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

Paula Poundstone

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

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

Steven Johnson

#62. 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