Quotes About Improvisation

I don't like to be caught without a pick.

You want to be playing off the cuff sometimes to take chances and make something happen.

You can't cheat comedy. You know, it either is going to be there on the day you capture or it's not.

I'm a guy who doesn't know the name of the chord, but I know that it sounds good.

I love to cook when I have the time. I don't cook French or Mexican food with exact recipes. I just go to the supermarket and buy things that look good, and I mix it all together and invent something. Ninety-five percent of the time, I'm lucky. Sometimes not so lucky, and I say, 'Let's go out to dinner.'

We go in and I do my thing, and then we supplement it with whatever we want.

The rules of improvisation apply beautifully to life. Never say no - you have to be interested to be interesting, and your job is to support your partners.

A number of Donald Trump's supporters told me during the campaign they had faith that he would be a good president because he would be helped by the experts around him. But the president's improvisation saps experts of their key skill: pattern recognition.

Perfect retention. I don't think I could do that-I've never disciplined myself to do it. I suppose a lot of it is a question of discipline. Which improvisation is not.

I think I was supposed to play jazz.

I came up with a 'forecasting cell,' which is basically a mixed intention cell or chord that is a complete hybrid of a consonance and a dissonance, and what that does when you are improvising is lead you to where you are supposed to go.

Then I came up with this crazy idea just to walk out on the stage with no band at all and just start singing whatever came to mind. I actually fought the idea for a while because it seemed almost too radical, but it became obvious what I was supposed to be doing.

I'm not a big planner. Things always sort of surprise me.

I don't like the idea of pre-meditated music. Things like free-styling, the element of surprise - I think people need to scale back and re-focus on making moments again.

With solos, I don't like to be too prepared going in - I like to surprise myself.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

The best live recordings capture elements of surprise onstage.

I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won't do something I want them to in the story.

Sometimes, you don't know what's going to happen to your character until the night before you shoot the scene. So, sometimes, you get a great big surprise at the very last minute, which is scary sometimes. You don't have a whole lot of time to prepare.

It has happened a few times that I've found myself in a surprise mid-tour recording session.

With Sean Penn, he wants to be surprised. He doesn't necessarily want what he's written, although we'll do what he's written. He likes the danger of acting.

I enjoy working with actors so much and having the chance to be surprised by them.

I don't plot, and I don't plan. I like to be surprised like the reader.