Quotes About Improvisation

I don't have a real recipe with measurements for my chicken stew. I just kind of make it up as I go. I made it for the first time one Christmas when I came home from college. It's guaranteed to cure a cold.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

Music is like cooking for me: you mix the ingredients together in one big pan and see how they end up. Through experimenting, you find what you really like and stick with it.

Whatever is on the page is what I'm married to. I'm very prepared. I'm a thespian. I don't like to improv. I don't like to go off course 'cause I think that's where stuff happens. When you stick to the material 'cause it's written so well, that's where the magic happens.

One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.

I added and deleted according to the audiences' response to different gestures, and chose songs to build an act that would constantly stimulate my audience.

Personally, I've found one of the more stimulating ways of playing in recent times has been to kind of move outside the free improvised area and work with people who are probably improvisers but they have a particular way of working.

With my fashion knowledge, I do stitch things randomly at times.

I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.

Half of 'Mudbound' were shots I stole in between other scenes.

I'm probably one of the worst actors as far as preparation goes, because I actually don't prepare. I find it easier to read the script and whatever hits me in my stomach, like deep down, I just go with it. And the director kind of molds me whether to go right or left with it.

When you start a show, the plans are not set in stone. They're really mutable, cocktail napkin sketches.

Flair was a guy who 90 percent of your match was called on the fly, while Savage was a guy who had 90 percent of it set in stone before the match began.

I started in documentaries, and that was a great help to me with improvisation, because with documentaries, you're handed a big lump of footage, and you have to shape it and make it into a story - which I love doing.

You walk on a set, and you have no idea - that's why I don't storyboard. It's all possible.

I don't storyboard, and I don't really shot list. I let the shots be determined by how the actors and I figure out the blocking in a scene, and then from there, we cover it.

In the Indian system of filmmaking, you don't plan well in advance, stick to a storyboard, or deliver only the scripted lines.

We storyboard a lot, but I love when we are just going in there and just, almost on the fly, making stuff and discovering moments. It's just fantastic, where you can really go in there and be creative and everything.

As a stand-up, as a storyteller, as an improviser, I've done thousands of shows. They allow me to work out new material that might turn into something later. They let me keep my muscles sharp for when the rent-paying gigs do come along. They keep me sane.

Role-playing games are just an organic improvised space for storytelling.

I do develop characters for songs, and I think of everything as storytelling, in a way. But I don't plan out what they're going to sound like. I just sing over what I've done.

I don't plan the books ahead of time. It's not like Harry Potter. I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline.

I'm not a musician, but I play music. So it's a strange thing.

When you're improvising, you connect with people in a way you don't in normal life, strangely.