Quotes About Improvisation

It's amazing what you can do when you get creative.

But hell, you've gotta work with what you've got.

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.

Imagination can be your best friend, you know.

You never knew when condoms might come in handy . . . you could blow them up like balloons and tie messages to them, or fill them with water, or roll them on to your fingers and use them as fingerstalls. He didn't really foresee any possibility of their being put to the purpose for which they were intended.

It's like what Miles Davis says: "Don't worry about mistakes, there aren't any.

Whenever I write first drafts, I like to maximize the possibility of f-ups, mistakes, mis-written words, digressions, crazy changes in tone, etc. This is why I don't use outlining software or even a computer and why I spread pages and images and research materials kinda crazy across the table. Never know what'll happen.

You cannot approach this from logic. You have to approach this from the most wild depths of your imagination.

I know in the spy movies it always looks really cool when the operative goes from a maid's uniform to a slinky, sexy, ballgown in the amount of time it takes an elevator to climb three floors. Well, I don't know how it is for TV spies, but I can tell you that even with Velcro, the art of the quick change is one that must take a lot of practice (not to mention better lighting than one is likely to find in a tunnel that was once part of the underground railroad).

You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses.

I can't wait to do a fully improvised script again, to find people who are really comfortable and into it. It's about the capabilities of the people you're working with, what are their strengths and weaknesses. Some of the most brilliant actors need the spine of the text to work off of, and there's no shame in that; they're actors, not writers.

But the worst feeling as a crowd work practitioner is that not only is crowd work, for me, the most fun thing to do on stage - I always say the less written jokes I tell in a set the more fun I was having--but it's also a secret weapon.

If I forgot to put something on, and I have to wear a trash bag, I'm just like, 'I'm gonna rock a trash bag today.'

I like jazz, but I could never play it. You just sit there with a guitar the size of a Chevy on your chest, wearing a stupid hat, playing the same solo for an hour.

You've gotta leave enough space for your actors to bring stuff to the table and whatever the weather's doing that day or what the light's like. Things can shift, and you have to be malleable. Every day is a different feeling and a change.

When I was a little, little kid, my family got a new washing machine, and they had a big box that was left over. So I cut a big hole in the box, and I made it like a giant TV set. I brought it into the living room, and I did the news and the weather for my family.

Jazz is such a living art form. It happens right in the moment. You weave a story by changing certain elements and components.

Every day, you have to make three hours of music, just randomly improvising, and that's a great way to weed stuff out.

A lot of the time, you're supposed to play to the top of your intelligence, as truthful as possible. But when you're on stage making people laugh, you're still acting. I think it helped me a bunch to go on stage two or three times a week.

I don't like to practice; I like spontaneity. When I don't play guitar for a week and I pick it up again, I play better.

We just said, 'Okay, you're in the movie. Bring what you would bring for a three-day weekend and I hope you like the way you look in it because once you're on camera, that's your wardrobe.' But it worked; it worked and we were very surprised.

But it was this tough little character part that I was playing, a very funny little guy that I invented over a weekend, because I realized I was not contributing to the humor of this thing. And I had to do something.

It's an awesome thing to be flung out onto the stage twice a weekend in front of 250 people, and you have to make it up as you go along.

I'm very interested in the distance and the space between those two poles: very concrete, song-based stuff on the one hand and very improvisational, abstract stuff on the other. I don't see any reason music should exclude one or the other, and I think the pairing of them together makes for very interesting music in a lot of ways.