Quotes About Improvisation

Kids don't plan to play. They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.'

I think part of that is to create an environment where it's like real life, where you don't really know what's going to happen to you in a certain scene.

In real life, you don't know what's going to happen to you, so why would your character know? It's liberating to play the emotion your character is feeling at the time and not know what's coming up. I like it.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

I think you're a better comedian when you're in the moment and you're kind of reacting to what's happening like a real person instead of doing rote memorization.

I feel like some of the delivery that people find funny is literally me trying to remember the exact line in real time.

In college, I didn't perform so much, but when I graduated is when I discovered Second City. Then I realized, 'Oh, there are people who can focus on comedy and especially improvisational comedy and make a career out of it.'

If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's the Fall.

We weren't by any means like the Grateful Dead or something, who could just roll on and on and on.

There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.

I remember in Shallow Grave I remember a few times when we'd only have to do one take. But when you did have to do more than one, you'd build on the one you'd done.

You have to be able to adjust on the fly, and that is what the great ones do.

The great thing about 'Breaking Bad' was they were able to write themselves out of anything.

For 'The Grey Album,' I'd been thinking about the good side of lying - lying as a kind of improvisatory act in black culture. Afterward, it nagged at me because there are those other kinds of lies that I think are all around us, and I was fascinated about hoaxes in general. So 'Bunk' became a natural extension of 'The Grey Album.'

Playing the guitar, you kind of lock into a rhythm and a groove, and then it relaxes me to make up lyrics and sing.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

There's a certain amount of world-building that I hold off on until I need it for the story. World building in advance isn't really my thing, maybe because I didn't grow up playing RPG's.

With Christopher Guest films, we have a lot of say.

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

It was very satisfying knowing I could come in not really knowing what I was going to do, and at the end of the session feeling that I'd really done interesting guitar work and knowing that I'd really contributed to the music.

Sometimes I play guitar like a frustrated drummer.

We just played whatever we could get ahold of. If we were at a party and we had a banjo, a mandolin and guitar or 10 guitars, that's what we played that night.

In the past, when I lacked designer duds, I simply relied on my hot glue gun.

I've bombed on stage millions and millions of times. And that's part of it. You go up with a half-baked idea, and you bomb, and so what? Nothing bad happens if you bomb.