Quotes About Improvisation

With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you're gonna get out of it. It's like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you're acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit strategy, and have the cameras rolling.

Just because traditional education was a matter of routine in which the plans and programs were handed down from the past, it does not follow that progressive education is a matter of planless improvisation.

You have to grab moments when they happen. I like to improvise and ad lib.

As you get ready to walk out under the bright lights of the improvisational stage of the rest of your life... be bold. Don't always worry about what your next line is going to be.

I never wrote a joke in my life. I just get on stage and let it flow.

I don't want to write my life. I live my life. I want to make up a new world.

We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.

...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

I knew I was going to be composing. It all makes sense in retrospect. But you don't know while you're in the process of improvising your life.

There's no real formula for doing it, it's either just living life and writing down a joke you think of in the middle of the day and then pieces those together later.

So much of a stand-up's life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

You cannot make chicken salad out of Chicken shit.

Tragedy--as also Comedy--was at first mere improvisation.

Sometimes being spontaneous and jumping on an opportunity is the only way you can see art being made.

I love when a song is conceived as a jigsaw puzzle in the studio, and then it's a natural to play live. That's my gauge of success for a song.

The great songs just come out. If it comes quick, just leave it that way.

Working with animals forces an actor to work harder because you have to be quick when it comes to improvisation, and you can't break character - at all.

When you're working as an actor when you're younger, or even when you're older, it's carney life. You go from one show to the other and you make these quick makeshift families.

I'm a comedian. I want you to laugh. That's my main goal. I punch things up to get things tighter, quicker and get you to the joke faster.

I think that a lot of us at home are iron chefs in their own right in that we have to come up with meals real quickly.

Call me the Scatman. I do quite a bit of scattin'.

I've had a lot of creative license; I improvise quite a bit. There's a lot I like to do that satiates my creativity, but at the end of the day, I just want to make the guy or gal happy who's directing the movie.

I think of jazz as being homage through innovation. Don't quote that as a definition, but it comes pretty close.