Quotes About Improvisation

Catherine O'Hara's one of the most amazing, wonderful actresses, but she's an amazing improviser. She really is.

I'm more of a writer than an actor, and I used to say that I'm mostly an improviser, though I haven't improvised in awhile.

'MacGruber' came to life mostly because we just liked saying 'MacGyver.' 'MacGyver' this. 'MacGyver' that. It's a great word.

Getting caught is the mother of invention.

No battle plan can anticipate all contingencies. There are always unexpected factors, including those stemming from the opponent's initiative. A battle thus becomes a balance between plan and improvisation, between intellect and reflex, between error and correction.

The truth is, my life never went according to plan, or a plan, or anything resembling a plan. It just sort of sprawled. Some lucky people have lives like a new colony, where the public buildings and houses and streets and markets and town walls are all laid out and completed before the first settler moves in. The rest of us are like old villages which grew up haphazard, strung out along a road or squashed in between two mountains.

We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.

Plan B?' Ivy said. 'What is plan B?' Jenks reddened. 'Grab the fish and run like hell,' he muttered, and I almost giggled.

Did you know you just put the peel in the pan and the potatoes down the waste disposal?' he enquired with interest. 'It's a new recipe.' His lips twitched but his expression remained solemn. 'The results should be...interesting.

I don't rehearse a lot. I try to keep it organic. Even in movies, the less I rehearse, the better I am.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

The sequence that made Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Dream Speech" the greatest speech of the twentieth century had all been improvised. The words "I have a dream" are not in the original copy of the speech!

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.

Larry was always full of ideas about things of which he had no experience.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

The best impromptu speeches are the ones written well in advance.

I think that one can have luck if one tries to create an atmosphere of spontaneity.

What do these children do without story books? Naftali asked. And Reb Zebulun replied: They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live without them. I couldn't live without them. Naftali said.

Life is mostly freehand.

That same night I dug Lampshade on Fillmore and Geary. Lampshade is a big colored guy who comes into musical Frisco saloons with coat, hat, and scarf and jumps on the bandstand and starts singing; the veins pop in his forehead; he heaves back and blows a big foghorn blues out of every muscle in his soul.

Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you'd think the man wouldn't have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea.