Quotes About Improvisation

What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.

You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.

My stand-up is quite good now, people say. It's just like a big conversation each time. Every gig is a rehearsal.

If I have to write by a certain time, I can pull through, but usually I just let stuff happen, hanging out with comic friends - or bringing a basic idea on stage and seeing if it goes anywhere.

I found the recording sessions very freeing because you can really try things. When you're filming something, if you're improvising a film and you're wasting film and wasting a cameraman's time.

Particularly with live TV, I have a really good time reacting in the moment to things that are going on around me. I try to think of the viewers' perspective too.

Jazz goes into folk music, into rock music. Jazz is in practically everything except classical music where they're reading the same music all the time, the same way, the same tempo every night.

When I'm making a movie, I don't like to know what's going to happen next. I like to watch something and be surprised all the time, and just not know, and let it take me wherever.

I realized that improvisers should probably always have time off. But musicians are always gigging and never have a chance to stop for a minute - unless something drastic occurs.

I'm very open and never write what I'm going to say. Speeches bore everybody else. I have to freestyle. Every time, from one program to another, everything changes and I improvise.

I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.

It usually takes me two or three days to prepare an impromptu speech.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

It takes three weeks to prepare a good ad-lib speech.

I could never plan a thing and get it to come out the way I planned it. It came out some other way--some way I had not counted upon.

Allt kan ske, allt är möjligt och sannolikt. Tid och rum existera icke; på en obetydlig verklighetsgrund spinner inbillningen ut och väver nya mönster: en blandning av minnen, upplevelser, fria påhitt, orimligheter och improvisationer.

Acting is reacting.

The essence of hacking is finding unintended or overlooked uses for the laws and properties of a given situation and then applying them in new and inventive ways to solve a problem — whatever it may be.

I never practice. I always play.

making the best of a bad situation is the heart of creativity.

Can you define 'plan' as a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures held together by panic, indecision, and ignorance? If so, then it was a very good plan.

Can you define "plan" as "a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision, and ignorance"? If so, it was a very good plan.

Whatever the opposite of a plan is, that's what I've got.

If you hand me a guitar, I'll play the blues. That's the place I automatically go.