Quotes About Improvisation

As soon as you know what you're doing, you're doing it wrong. That's what I find with acting. As soon as it becomes padded, it becomes pat.

There's nothing worse than trying to patch something or make do. If there wasn't something there in the beginning, it won't be there at the end.

To really be on stage and not know what you're going to say, and to be able to say something that makes people laugh, or do something that's sort of abstract or off the beaten path and have people connect to it by just putting your ideas together, that really makes me happy.

I don't really try to pattern myself after any particular person. I pretty much make it up as I go along.

When I grew up, there were common patterns to people's lives. Now everybody is just making it up as they go along.

I got this Christmas gift with the entire Beatles catalog. I had fun trying to duplicate what I was hearing on these records, only using the instruments I had at hand - an acoustic guitar, and that's all. It was endlessly amusing to me to try to imitate John Lennon and Paul McCartney's harmonies using the guitar.

Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.

The best thing I can make is a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.

I always lose every single pencil I ever had. So I can draw with everything. With pencil, with pen.

The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear.

I mean, I can sit down with a guitar, and in fact, we do two, three songs with just guitar and percussion.

When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.

When it's a live performance, anything can happen.

It was more freeing, mainly because he's so free anyway. He just is in his performance. So to mimic someone doing a free performance, well, that's pretty freeing within itself.

I try to see interviewing as performance art, and just take it as it comes.

One single raga can be performed for two hours, three hours.

Everything I've performed has been from my own head.

What all my years in improvisation taught is that - if you're going to grow as a performer - you have to try some new things. You've got to be willing to take a few risks.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

In films you do a scene, you play around with it and unless you're doing a lot of reshooting, which no one has the luxury to do, you deal with the problem for a day and then you move on. On some level, it never allows you to go very deep into what performing is about.

There's real drama in performing live. You never know how it's going to be.

I had a very active imagination as a kid, and I was constantly performing, whether I was making money doing it or not, whether it was on a stage in front of 1,000 people or in the living room in front of my family.

I think comics do need permission to fail. I think comics do need permission to go up and try stuff.

You never know what you're getting into like some of the best experiences I've ever had have been movies that literally had a million dollar budget and everybody's eating Cheetos all day and running around without permits and trying not to get caught.