Quotes About Improvisation

Analysis kills spontaneity.

On his trip to the Hebrides with Boswell in 1773, he used the word 'depeditation' in reference to the actor Samuel Foote, who had suffered a broken leg. Like a Scrabble player, Boswell challenged this, and Johnson admitted he had made the word up, before adding mischievously 'that he had not made above three or four in his Dictionary'. Horace

My method of writing is to take the most basic kind of line and improvise on it. After all, I am the child of the culture which created Jazz.

I never know what the hell I'm writing about, I never know what the next thing I'm writing about is, I never have a plan.

He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.

To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.

Improvisation has to do with exploring something like two brothers in a room together. You find out things about situations by discovering the things that they aren't saying. It's a way to explore scenes. Sometimes it's more useful than others, but it's always there to see if there's anything that you might improve.

The way I work uses a very on-the-spot flow, and I write the lyrics and the music when I feel them coming.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born.

Any problem can be solved using the materials in the room.

There's a way of playing safe, there's a way of using tricks and there's the way I like to play which is dangerously where you're going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven't created before.

I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it. I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used. I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing.

Just like using an instrument, a song calls for different things.

Every good gospel singer you can hear is a scat singer; they're just using different syllables. There are a lot of jazz singers out there, and more coming out of the churches.

I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.

I've never been one to think it was cheating to sample this or to loop the drum part there - I've always done that. Even using four-track cassette recorders, I was always doing whatever I could to make it as good as I could.

Frank liked me because I went nuts on the piano using feet, head, whatever I could find to bang on the piano.

I was 7 years old when I began composing. I began composing, improvising at the piano, the usual story.

I think with Shakespeare you can be required to do absolutely anything at the turn of a sixpence - suddenly you go into a battle, suddenly you utter something passionate.

I have never seen a script that hasn't gone through at least eight different iterations before they even begin filming, and frequently what is filmed is not what's in the script, because things change on the ground. An actor can't say a particular line. An actor will have a brainstorm and ad lib something utterly brilliant.

Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.

When I sit down to write a song, it's a kind of improvisation, but I formalize it a bit to get it into the studio, and when I step up to a microphone, I have a vague idea of what I'm about to do.

As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script. I'm not the world's best writer or the world's best actor, but I can do that thing where I can fix - or ruin - fix-slash-ruin, add quirk, add value.

My sense is that you can make a film under almost any circumstances. As long as someone has a vague idea of what he's doing, something distinctive will emerge. That, to me, is what film making is all about.