Quotes About Improvisation

There are a lot of things that make Kyrie's game unstoppable. But his ability to ad-lib and come up with things on the fly is special.

We always mess around with riffs and stuff and kind of jam out during sound checks, but we never actually started playing covers live until we started goofing off a little bit more on stage.

Every time I do a talk show or something, I'll be like, 'I'm doing 'Chandelier,' right?' and they're like, 'No, you're doing a skit and three dances.' It's different every time. I never really know what I'm doing until the day before.

Every now and then there might be a beat someone turned down that I have as an unused beat. But everything that predominantly matches the artist in my 30 years of doing this, it was me walking in and sitting there with no drums, no samples, no nothing, and making a beat on the spot.

On 'Scrubs,' I played a very unusual character who pretty much was defined by saying and doing strange things, so it was easy to improvise around that.

On Disney, we stick to the script. But you go to the 'Grown Ups set' and it's completely different. Same thing with Tyler Perry - it's nothing but ad-libbing.

Although idea and form are ultimately paramount in my work, so too are chance, accident, and rawness.

Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.

Learning to play is mostly about learning to hear, and learning to really listen deeply to sound in a musical way is a lifetime's worth of work.

Preparation is the be-all of good trial work. Everything else - felicity of expression, improvisational brilliance - is a satellite around the sun. Thorough preparation is that sun.

Because I don't work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I'm on this rock, now I'm on this rock, now I'm on this rock.

Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

While listening, to things like western swing, for instance, I'd work something out in my head, then play it on my National; not the same song, but one that captured the feeling of the original tune.

The only books that work are those which fly through the air - the ones you let happen, not make happen.

I'm not the type of player to sit home and practice scales and work on runs.

I really like to experiment. That's the only way I can work. It's instinctive.

What you try to do, as an actor, is just make it work somehow.

I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

If a director can find the exact combination between the written word as a guideline and improvisational input from his actors, I think that's where you'll find the most successful work being done.

In my work I've never done preliminary drawing, because it's sometimes difficult to repeat something or to continue when the urgency's gone.

What matters most to me? To work with my model until I have it enough in me to be able to improvise, to let my hand run free.

Steve Carell is the most spectacular ad-lib improviser ever. And just doing a scene with him, it's just one incredible topping himself on every take.

My harmony is passable but is usually made more eloquent at the hands of Steve Hamilton.

I think that's all you do as an actor. You give ingredients for the edit, and the edit's the stew, and they try to make a meal out of it. That's all you are. You just throw things in. This is an idea, this is an idea.