Quotes About Improvisation

It reminds me what Uma Thurman once said about actors improvising: "What most actors call improvising is just stammering and swearing. But another word for improvising is writing. And that's not what you pay actors to do.

My life has always been chaotic. From the time I got dressed in the back of a deflated, flat-tired, fish-smelling station wagon for Rocky. It's always been do it yourself, kind of like paper-clip it together.

I just do these 'Sleep' type tracks when the situation presents itself. I never set out to do them, like wait all day until I'm really tired or something. Gotta come natural.

When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

When we produced 'Highway,' Imtiaz Ali and I planned it as a quick small experimental film, while we waited for Ranbir Kapoor's dates later during the year.

I think if you take 'Get Ready,' 'Waiting For The Siren's Call,' 'Lost Sirens' - those three New Order albums were mostly guitar-based. There were a couple of dance tunes in there, but they were mainly guitar-oriented. They came about through jamming, a lot of them.

I sit around for ages waiting for inspiration. Then when I get an idea, I want to go with it and get something as quickly as possible. It's like catching a fly in a bottle. I'll play with drums for a bit, then the piano for a bit, play the guitar.

As an artist, I'm very used to waking up and sort of not knowing what my day's going to be and not knowing where my next paycheck is going to come from.

Electric Gypsy' was really raw. I was literally sketching out the lyrics as they walked in the door. I jumped up and had a sheet of paper and I showed them the chords, which are simple. We counted it off, I got the lyrics off the sheet into the song and played a solo at the end - done!

I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice.

Especially early on, I had no idea what I was going to be asked to do when I walked into a studio. I was doing 26 sessions a week - all day, all night.

For me anyway, until I was exposed to doing improvisation and walking onto a stage without any script, I would have never felt comfortable enough to walk into a room with someone like Larry David and audition.

When I put my brush to canvas, I never know what I'm going to paint. It's like when you're walking down the street with your hands in your pockets, humming a tune, you don't know what you'll be humming five minutes from now.

I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself.

If you're sitting around and doing Chekhov and the cat walks in, you must pay attention to the cat. You cannot continue the dialogue of Chekhov without including the cat. So on live television, we'd automatically go into ad-lib gear.

After a day of writing, I love nothing more than to go into my kitchen and start chopping onions and garlic on the way to cooking an improvised meal with whatever ingredients are on hand. Cooking is the perfect counterpoint to writing. I find it more relaxing than anything else, even naps, walks, or hot baths.

Sometimes you'd come up against a brick wall... or sometimes you go into a fill and you'd know halfway through it was going to be disastrous.

There's something interesting about playing live; you're in the moment, and I think it would be beneficial.

Watching Billy Connolly at the Hammersmith Apollo in the late 90s was a masterclass of long-form comedy.

I'm playing jazz throughout the song 'Black Sabbath.' That's what it is there. I mean, I'm moving some other things around, but that is forever in there.

All four of the actors in 'You're the Worst,' we all have strong theater backgrounds. We all play off of each other in that way that you would in theater. You kind of are up for anything out of the blue happening and getting it on film, you know? We're all just open to playing.

There's no blueprint for success in rock'n'roll.

Blues and jazz are such a root to music.

I love jazz and blues, where there's a structure, but a lot of the cool stuff is veering off the page and playing.