Quotes About Improvisation

[In making music] it's nice to not have a goal, to not have a set format. It's very liberating to just get out of your comfort zone and be in a new space.

Of course, it's very easy to be witty tomorrow, after you get a chance to do some research and rehearse your ad libs.

Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery

Leadership is an improvisational art. You may have an overarching vision, clear, orienting values, and even a strategic plan, but what you actually do from moment to moment cannot be scripted. To be effective, you must respond to what is happening.

Susie: Maybe we're all making everything up as we go.

Miles Davis once said: "Do not fear mistakes—there are none.

Roman emperors and their advisors never solved the problem of succession. They were defeated in part by biology, in part by lingering uncertainties and disagreements about how inheritance should best operate. Succession always came down to some combination of luck, improvisation, plotting, violence and secret deals. The moment when Roman power was handed on was always the moment when it was most vulnerable.

If life gives you lemons - make grapejuice. Then sit back and let people wonder how you did it.

I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder

I was gradually learning as a teacher why teachers' colleges were wrong to spend so much time on planning. The most important thing to learn was to be able to throw the plan away, whatever it was. What was necessary was to listen, to follow each minute to its peak, learning as you went.

I have a lot of problems with fifteen-minute jazz-funk jams as well. I don't care about instrumental prowess. I don't care about quick-thinking improvisational skill. At all. I'm a songwriter and I'm familiar with Cage and I couldn't really care about what notes people can think of quickly. It doesn't interest me and I'm astounded that it interests other people still. Improvisation is what you do in the process of making something better.

Nature has evolved to be the inventor of complexity. Just as a jazz musician embroiders around a theme, thus improvising new melodic phrases according to his inspiration and the public's reactions, nature plays spontaneously with the physical laws that were fixed at the start of the universe. It uses them to create novelty9

It's very hard to write a song alone. It's only by jamming that you can get a song together.

Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

We can't just say, "This pen is great, and consumers should buy it!" We ought to wrap up this message and create not only a convincing, but an interesting story around it. Here I am, improvising on the spot: A lady dropped her pen in the street, it was raining heavily, and a gentleman picked it up and said, "May I have your number?"

Dance is an art in space and time. The object of the dancer is to obliterate that.

A good life is like good jazz: it has rhythm.

Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise.

Of course I would do it again, but I know it would never be quite the same. Despite the best laid plans of the BBC, we ended up bustling, hurrying, rushing, improvising to get ourselves home only by the skin of our teeth. And that's what made it worth doing. The smoother the journey the duller it would have been.

First, nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix. Most of these remained in place for the next year or two.

the way as the performances enhance and even change the original idea. This is not "improvisation," this is like jazz: composition-in-the-moment.

None of us knew how to come back from this moment. This was where the script ended and we all had to improvise.

Okay, I know I said I wasn't going to shake things up, but we're going to have to get some pants on this one.

See, music is about style.