Top 100 Quotes About Improvisation
#1. Improvisation is empowering because it welcomes the unknown. And since what's impossible is always unknown, it allows me to believe I can cheat the impossible.
Philippe Petit
#2. To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.
Isaac Asimov
#3. Most of my act is improvisation. I'm inspired for the moment. Standing there in front of 2,000 or 3,000 people you don't know can be pretty inspiring.
Howie Mandel
#4. I use improvisation as a writing tool to help produce material that goes into a script, but a well-crafted script shouldn't sound scripted, and oftentimes people confuse something that looks like improvisation for what is actually a very well-written script that is well-acted.
Steve Coogan
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.
Jan Garbarek
#9. 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
#10. Lying is manipulation. I prefer to call what I did 'improvisation in times of desperation.
Katie Kacvinsky
#11. I love improvisation. You can't blame it on the writers. You can't blame it on direction. You can't blame it on the camera guy ... It's you. You're on. You've got to do it, and you either sink or swim with what you've got.
Jonathan Winters
#12. I do love improvisation, I love when I find an object in my studio or kitchen (look, a tea sample's tiny glass jar!) and instantly incorporate it in a project. It makes me feel creative on an every day basis.
Signe Baumane
#13. 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
#14. I started improvisation at age nine, and I loved it so much I stuck with it. As a by-product, acting was just something I was lucky enough to fall into.
Cassie Steele
#15. I'm very interested in the improvisation because one of the things I do is to help train scientists to communicate in a better way and more personal way when they're making a presentation, and I use improvisation to do that.
Alan Alda
#16. I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I'm blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.
Anthony Hopkins
#17. Only he who is well prepared has any opportunity to improvise.
Ingmar Bergman
#18. I mix everything up. A museum curator once said to me that there is a great jazz component to the way I do things because good jazz is improvisation and draws elements from all different cultures. And that's the way I do everything - the way I dress and decorate.
Iris Apfel
#19. The minute you make a mistake - that's improvisation!
Barry Harris
#20. Life itself was an improvisation in which I was going to have to deal with what came to me and not think about what should have come.
Alan Alda
#21. As an actor I worked for seven years with a community theater company based in London. We used improvisation techniques to take stories to young people who wouldn't normally have access to them - in prisons, hospitals, young offender's units, youth clubs and housing estates.
Jenny Downham
#22. Believe it or not, this simple phrase, "Yes! And . . ." is the secret of improv.
Amy Lisewski
#23. But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience.
Romare Bearden
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I think that music, or at least the kind of music that I make, benefits greatly from improvisation.
Ryan Adams
#27. Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
W. Somerset Maugham
#28. Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#29. I don't think I differentiate between composition and improvisation. Improvisation could be a large part of a composition.
Yoshi Wada
#30. Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.
Paul Simon
#31. There is no facet of my professional life that doesn't require or request improvisation.
Marc Evan Jackson
#32. I allow an area for improvisation because the chemical things actors bring to stories make it not work.
Vincente Minnelli
#33. Working with animals forces an actor to work harder because you have to be quick when it comes to improvisation, and you can't break character - at all.
Kyle Massey
#35. I like messing up the song, doing some improvisation. And I like running around the room with the mic.
Erika M. Anderson
#36. The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.
Flea
#37. I believe that improvisation is really just a directorial tool. It's a writing tool. It's not so much that the actors get to say whatever they want, whatever pops into their head. It's an opportunity to write the last draft of the screenplay as you're working on it.
Ivan Reitman
#38. 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
#39. All you're trying to do in an improvisation is get as much material as possible for the editing room.
Martin Short
#40. Stay fluid and roll with those changes. Life is just a big extended improvisation.
Jane Lynch
#41. When you have done something that took courage and someone wants to share the joy you created for them by your actions, please give yourself permission to take the applause in whatever form it appears.
Amy Lisewski
#42. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.(p.115)
Malcolm Gladwell
#43. A strict form such as mine cannot be achieved through improvisation.
Michael Haneke
#44. 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
#45. Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.
Emma Thompson
#46. Jazz is improvisation and syncopation, with resilience and flow, with earthy elegance, nuance and subtlety, with the integrity of individual expression within (usually) a group context, with true democracy in action.
Greg Thomas
#47. I really think that martial arts and music are very close to each other and both require a lot of focus and improvisation because you don't know where or when you're going to get kicked!
Hiromi
#48. Improvisation is the art of being completely O.K. with not knowing what the f - you're doing
Mick Napier
#49. That, as my cousin Nord would say, is where my improvised lie falls apart.
Eoin Colfer
#50. You've got to have fun playing. It bothers me when players don't seem to be enjoying themselves, even when they play an incredible improvisation.
Rufus Reid
#52. 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
#53. I've never been a big fan of improvisation, because I think you appreciate the process and the cleverness of it more than the actual comedy in most cases.
Alan Thicke
#55. I used to go to the Improvisation Comedy Club every night in Times Square. How I didn't get killed in that area either means that 1) God is watching over me or 2) I am so insignificant to God that he didn't bother having me killed.
Gilbert Gottfried
#56. If it's a modern-day story dealing with certain ethnic groups, I think I could open up certain scenes for improvisation, while staying within the structure of the script.
Martin Scorsese
#57. I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.
John McLaughlin
#58. I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.
Sonny Rollins
#59. 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
#60. The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.
Ken Burns
#61. 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
#63. It's an improvisation on a theme. You know where you want to go, but you don't know how to get there. It's not linear.
Richard Holbrooke
#65. 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
#66. The problem that I have is with the music business. For some reason it seems almost impossible to get anything, any music, released which includes improvisation or soloing.
Jan Hammer
#67. When I sit down to write a song, it's a kind of improvisation, but I formalize it a bit to get it into the studio, and when I step up to a microphone, I have a vague idea of what I'm about to do.
Paul McCartney
#68. The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. 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
#70. Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#71. Improvisation is the essence of good talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared for us; but let heaven not less defend us from the beautiful spontaneous writer who puts his trust in the inspiration of the moment.
Max Beerbohm
#72. 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
#73. Even if the script's well written there's something about the life of an improvisation that resonates better than a written word, sometimes.
John Travolta
#74. To write a book about improvisation is partly a contradiction in terms. Improvisation is spontaneous. It's in the moment.
Sally Schneider
#75. Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation
experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way
Paul Theroux
#77. 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
#78. Certain kinds of speed, flow, intensity, density of attacks, density of interaction ... Music that concentrates on those qualities is, I think, easier achieved by free improvisation between people sharing a common attitude, a common language.
Evan Parker
#80. Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.
Cecil Taylor
#81. 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
#82. Wasted tries, The many whys, Is it the soul of Compromise?
Lows and highs, Believing in lies, In life we have to improvise.
Frustration and cries, The last leg of sighs, You are the dreamer in disguise!
To the guilt say goodbyes, Open your eyes, Your soul - I do so recognize.
Julieanne O'Connor
#83. When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. "This is where we're going because, well, that's where we said we were going." And that's the problem: Plans are inconsistent with improvisation.
Jason Fried
#84. There's always a certain amount of camera improvisation.
Allan Dwan
#85. All actors have to make the words fit in their mouths, and make the words the words fit to how you say it and how you make it life-like and make it look like what you're saying is just conversation that you're just thinking off the top of your head. That process is not quite improvisation.
Bruce Willis
#86. I like films that are well-written and concise and with not a lot of room for improvisation.
Patrice Leconte
#87. The shortest feedback loop I can think of is doing improvisation in front of an audience.
Demetri Martin
#88. If anybody is a master at improvisation, it would be Ken Jeong. He is hilarious.
Anneliese Van Der Pol
#89. How does anyone know from moment to moment what to say or do next until he senses the reaction to what he just did? He doesn't know. Life is always action/reaction. No monologues. No prepared speeches. An improvisation no matter how we mentally rehearse our big moment.
Robert McKee
#90. I've always been a spontaneous singer. And all the stuff that you hear on the end of the songs, what they call the ad libs - that just comes out of my head. That's not thought out at all. I have the verses and the choruses, and then after that it's total improvisation.
Daryl Hall
#91. Successful startups are just like jazz bands, masters of improvisation marching to syncopated beats
Mark Anthony Peterson
#92. Let me have two locks of your hair, and help my mother plait them into a bow-string for me. "Does anything depend on it asked Hallgerd". "My life depends on it replied Gunnar.
Anonymous
#93. The music of the Gypsies belongs in the sphere of improvisation rather than in any other, without which it would have no power to exist.
Franz Liszt
#94. My gigs are built on improvisation: I go out there and I'm like the Energizer bunny.
Meat Loaf
#95. 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
#96. There's always some room for improvisation.
Satyajit Ray
#97. Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free,' but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Let us reflect, if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen.
Victor Hugo
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