Quotes from Keith Johnstone

The improviser has to understand that his first skill lies in releasing his partner's imagination.

Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be 'wrong', which is what our education encourages us to believe.

Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more 'respectful' teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children.

When you want to have entertainment, it must be a waste of time. I don't like that. I don't like improvisation being pointless.

Good impro can make you laugh, we love it, but soon the content is forgotten. Good scenes from The Life Game stay with you always. They haunt you.

I think my brain is much more intelligent than I am...so I tend to trust it.

The best laughs are on the recognition of truth.

Truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal.

I'm not against work, I think work is great, I work a lot; but if you want to play, the consequences must not be important.

There are people who prefer to say 'yes' and there are people who prefer to say 'no'. Those who say 'yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say 'no' are rewarded by the safety they attain.

As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I'd lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age - just as a lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn't understand that clarity is in the mind.

The most repressed, and damaged, and 'unteachable' students that I have to deal with are those who were the star performers at bad high schools. Instead of learning how to be warm and spontaneous and giving, they've become armoured and superficial, calculating and self-obsessed. I could show you many many examples where education has clearly been a destructive process.

The mime must first of all be aware of this boundless contact with things. There is no insulating layer of air between the man and the outside world. Any man who moves causes ripples in the ambient word in the same way a fish does when it moves in the water.

Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more 'respectful' teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children.

Almost all were total failures-they couldn't have been put on in the village hall for the author's friends. It wasn't a matter of lack of talent, but of miseducation. The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life. My play had been influenced by Beckett, but at least the content had been mine.

Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged, This is because they accept all offers made—which is something no 'normal' person would do.

These 'offer-block-accept' games have a use quite apart from actor training. People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding.

My 'failure' was a survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my way out of the trap that my education had set for me. I would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from me than now.

My feeling is that sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence up because we don't want to be rejected by other people—and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way.

What a person is afraid to do, he does while possessed.

One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I'd had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. If I'd have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond.

My feeling is that a good teacher can get results using any method, and that a bad teacher can wreck any method.

An audience will remain interested if the story is advancing in some sort of organised manner, but they want to see routines interrupted, and the action continuing between the actors.

It was largely my interest in art that had destroyed any life in the world around me. I'd learned perspective, and about balance, and composition. It was as if I'd learned to redesign everything, to reshape it so I saw what OUGHT to be there, which of course is much inferior to what IS there. The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education.