Quotes About Improvisation

I don't make any plans, as life never happens according to plans.

I just play music by listening and responding, so I don't know anything about writing songs or arranging and all of this stuff. You know, it's in my head, but I don't know how to get it out.

If I'm feeling like rock, we'll do some of that, and if I'm feeling some other way, we might do some of that. So, that's typically how I record and write and play music and anything else.

Generally we just play music when we feel like it.

James Brown was one of the first artists who found four bars that he liked and played them the entire way through, and then he just added to it vocally.

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

I am a saxophone player.

I'm somebody who plays the piano... sometimes.

Find one note on the instrument that pleases you, and then find another note that also pleases you.

I like to allow a story to arise as I'm writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes.

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

I never make a note of anything; I never even write a plot down.

I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

I pluck with my fingernails. If I break a nail, I can't cancel a concert. So I can make a nail out of a ping-pong ball.

When I was doing 'A Disappearing Number' in Plymouth, we had to go on an hour and a half late, and I still hadn't written an end, so we had to make one up, and then we had to go out literally with our pants round our ankles.

I always walk around with a few moves in my pocket. You never know when you may need to bust one out.

You get this really cool groove when you're playing just piano, bass, and drums where everyone's sort of feeling each other's space, which is the only way to put it, but it really is true, and everyone's sort of sitting in their own pocket. It's kind of jazz-like.

I have a little pocket journal. I just put the pen on the paper and just go.

It's a part of my game, something I've done since I was a little kid. Whenever I have an opportunity to do it, I feel comfortable outside the pocket. Big plays happen that way.

No one could ad lib like Peter. You would think that it was all scripted, he was so poetic, but it wasn't.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

I wasn't a jazz player, but a classical musician, and I improvised arrangements of popular songs using classical motifs.

I can sit and write clever things, but that never quite works as well as when I'm just chatting about stupid things in the moment.

Though I have an idea about the climax, it always changes when we start shooting.