Quotes About Performance

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

If you improvise a riff and the crowd immediately reacts to it, you know you're on to something.

If you have a great script and great dialogue, you don't need to improvise.

If I'm doing comedy, I try to improvise a lot. Even if they don't use it, it helps me loosen up and figure out the character.

Confident people, who understand comedy, improvise so much better than people who are scared. You can't be scared to improvise. You have to know your character, and then you have to let go.

My friends, we all improvise together usually. So we write what I think is a good script but always leave a lot of room to find stuff on the day; and we always do find something. That's the advantage to having actors who are, in their own right, writers.

When I graduated from college, I moved to New York and started doing improv because I read all about the early 'Saturday Night Live' guys having come through Second City and learning how to improvise, so I wanted to get immediately into that.

Most things I get hired on, I get hired because I improvise something funny, or they just think I look weird.

I get hired because I improvise well.

In the kind of films that I do, there is an extremely limited number of people that can improvise. The reason the ensemble continues in the movies is because those are the people that can do that kind of work. It's not just an accident those people are in the film.

I'm not a good improv-er, which is what a lot of comedic actors are really good at. I have failed miserably when I've been asked to improvise.

I'm not an actor. I can show up for friends and improvise a little bit, but I'm not an actor. I can't remember lines.

My music is written with one goal in mind: to improvise. It's like explaining a great story in words, but without words, much faster than you could with words. It's like a direct line of instantaneous communication where you don't have to wait for the end.

Someone like my father will improvise as much as 90% of the music in concert, but with me it's maybe 10 to 20%. It's sort of the test of how great someone is, the more they can improvise correctly and still be true to the raga they're playing, and still keep it new and fresh the whole time.

I think by now if people hire me, they know I'm going to improvise. I'm an improviser by trade.

I like to improvise so much live because I get bored playing the same thing over again. It's like the kid at school that already knows all the answers so doodles all over the paper. I do that a lot live.

When you're writing, you're putting thought into what you want to express, and then you come up with it - it comes to you. When you're improvising, it's the same thing. You're writing. You just say it out loud right then, instead of saying, 'You think this might work?'

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.

I stopped being interested in improvisation, and I continue to not be that interested in it. Comedians can do it on a different level because they have a goal, but if you're improvising something that's dramatic, there's not that much to be good at.

I've never been good at improvising.

I'm really good at improvising on stage, so if I'd forget a step, I'll just make up something. And the rest of the dancers would be like... what is she doing!? It always looked like they have forgotten the step, so I got away with it!

I'm used to sort of improvising a lot when I do my comedies.

I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.

In fact, I just play a glamour doll in 'Vijayendra Varma,' for the first time in my career.