Quotes About Improvisation

If you are a stand-up you can hone your material over successive performances, based on the audience response. Changing a single word or altering the pace or emphasis can make a previously failed witticism work.

You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.

I've had experiences where I wasn't allowed to change words around at all because you have to say everything, exactly as written on the page. That's not fun for me. For me, part of being an actor is being able to contribute to a character's rhythms. If there's room to explore, you find a happy medium.

I don't really plan ahead very far. I have never known what I'm doing more than a few pages ahead.

You just don't know when you get all the paint across the canvas how it will turn out. When you step back after you've finished, you say, 'This one is not so good. This one is good.'

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

I like to use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.

The future has never been something that I've been able to plan. Every time I try - I don't care if it's three or four days ahead or a week ahead - it just doesn't pan out.

I had always done these 3D things that you could walk through. They were always done off the seat of my pants without blueprints or course.

I love flying by the seat of my pants, going at something instinctually.

You and I and everybody in show business and the entertainment industry fly by the seat of our pants. We don't know quite what is going to happen.

I'm flying by the seat of my pants, never creating with a thought to what's up ahead!

Being on 'The Following' is constantly flying by the seat of my pants. The story can change and the character can change at a moment's notice.

I operate by the seat of my pants.

I fly from the seat of my pants, basically.

Most of the places I came from, you gotta do a lot of gunslinging or coaching by the seat of your pants.

Everything I've ever done in my whole career, people might not know, I've never written anything down on paper.

I used to be an obsessive outliner - figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down.

President Karzai was an accidental president. There was no paradigm for the conditions he faced, because no one could have imagined 9/11. He had to improvise under very difficult conditions to hold this country together.

I didn't know what the hell Charlie Parker was playing... I just liked the way he played.

I love guys like Charlie Parker.

I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven't heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.

The way that I write novels in particular is I don't usually outline; I just write. Part of the fun is discovering what's happening in the story as I'm going along.

I'm making it up as I go along, like everyone else. There probably are some actors who are quite methodical or at least take their time about what particular footholds to find on the rocks next. There are always choices, even when you're not getting seen, for how to spend your time. It's only after 10 years that I got any kind of traction at all.