Riffing Off Quotes

#1. I enjoyed so much working with the guys from Wilco, and riffing off of them, and having someone come up to me with ideas, because normally in the studio it's me who has to come up with all the ideas.

Billy Bragg

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

Steven Johnson

#3. I do have a vague recollection of reviving the cover of The Beatles' 'Every Little Thing,' but I don't know if that was just our riffing on it in rehearsal. I don't think we ever did it actually in the show.

Chris Squire

#4. O how many noble deeds of women are lost in obscurity!

Seneca.

#5. The best I do, if I'm just playing around and riffing in a fantasy world, and then I'll write something down. Hopefully I write it down.

Stephen Malkmus

#6. In leadership writ large, mutually agreed upon purposes help people achieve consensus, assume responsibility, work for the common good, and build community.

Joseph C. Rost

#7. To see how seriously men take things and yet how little their seriousness profits them. Their tragedy makes our mediocrity all the more terrible.

Thomas Merton

#8. I think when I feel I'm at my best is when I'm on stage, and it's my version of jazz because it's just riffing or something.

Billy Crystal

#9. I was always getting told off by my choir teacher for, you know, riffing when I shouldn't.

Rita Ora

#10. America's moved so much of its production and manufacturing offshore, it's become a nation of middlemen.

Andrew Dominik

#11. Who are these human beings anyway? They walk around, strut, fret, as if they owned the planet, or the goddamned universe. I mean, who do they really think they are?

Frederick Lenz

#12. I do lots of crowd work in my set, because I enjoy writing material through riffing and conversation.

Chris Hardwick

#13. Not everyone has to fly high to prove they exist; some of us are perfectly happy flying low and enjoying the view.

Mike A. Lancaster

#14. The idea of just improvising and riffing can sometimes be at the expense of story.

Jim Rash

#15. I do love the past but wouldn't want to live in it.

Sarah Waters

#16. In a weird way, riffing on genres is kind of a reaction to formula. When you watch so much of the programmers and the films that you just think you've seen before, it's kind of going back to the well in terms of trying to conjure up the spirit of what made you excited about films in the first place.

Edgar Wright

#17. A hundred failures mean a thousand successes

Ady Mifarizki

#18. The only way to build a church, if you have a Bible church, is to preach out of the Bible, teach out of the Bible, read out of the Bible.

Lester Roloff

#19. Sometimes when you're just thrown into something, you are more ready for it than when you have time to think it over and get nervous about it.

Lara Flynn Boyle

#20. I know you're supposed to hide your influences, but I suppose I see writing as riffing, really, about whatever you have been reading or thinking about that day or that week.

Steve Toltz

#21. It's such a private thing. It's a huge decision. It's not like you wake up one day and say, 'Oh, I'm going to change my sex - won't that be fun?'

Candis Cayne

#22. We had a work session [in "Moneyball" ]where about 30 scouts came in and out.We're all riffing, and after it, [director] Bennett Miller said, 'Look at these faces: This is what we have to do - we gotta get these guys in the scene.

Brad Pitt

#23. Riffing on language will create wonderful effects you never intended. Which leads me to this writing advice: 'Always take credit for good stuff you didn't intend, because you'll be getting plenty of criticism in your career for bad stuff you didn't mean either.'

Roy Peter Clark

#24. So the actual riffing came out of us just sitting there and doing it the way I think some people think we really did it, which is all spontaneously, and it really was.

Joel Hodgson