Quotes About Improvisation

The next time you're in a real jam, facing an important question that you just can't answer, go ahead and make up something—and everyone will believe you, because you're the guy who all those other times was crazy enough to admit you didn't know the answer.

I love the joy in the improvisational creative process.

Bop is no love-child of jazz.

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

Mr. Watras asked me whether I was practicing, and I told him I was practicing my tissue basketball skills.

But the reason that writers like Harlan and Lee don't outline is that they enjoy the serendipity, the surprises that arise when they're not constricted by the steel girdle of an outline. And I get that too. Some of the best plot twists in my work have been ones that I didn't plan on, including the ending to PARANOIA. One of the great pleasures of writing fiction is living in the story so that you "experience" it the way your characters do.

In those days, if you wanted to escape to another world, you had to create it yourself, using your brain, some paper, pencils, dice, and a few rule books.

There was always a trick to beating a computer-controlled opponent. At a game like this, a gifted human player could always triumph over the game's AI, because software couldn't improvise. It could either react randomly, or in a limited number of predetermined ways, based on a finite number of preprogrammed conditions. This was an axiom in videogames, and would be until humans invented true artificial intelligence.

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.

William Faulkner was once asked how he went about writing a book. His answer: "It's like building a chicken coop in a high wind. You grab any board or shingle flying by or loose on the ground and nail it down fast." Like becoming a pastor.

Certain kinds of speed, flow, intensity, density of attacks, density of interaction... Music that concentrates on those qualities is, I think, easier achieved by free improvisation between people sharing a common attitude, a common language.

Sometimes you go into a film and you have no time to prepare and have to compress the details into a few days and then rely on the instinct and what happens when you're in a scene with other actors and that chemistry or not.

I'm just preparing my impromptu remarks.

There was a lot of improvisation on 'Step Brothers.' I remember it being really frightening, and it took me a long time to get used to it and grow to be able to hold my own. But I remember when it was done feeling like, 'I don't know if I ever want to go back to working another way.'

If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room, you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything.

When I do a remix, I try to think about what I don't have in my bag and create something to fill that gap.

Unless you're Barack Obama, you cannot pull off an impromptu a capella rendition of a heart-warming song in the middle of a speech.

The drum records that I like are ones on which the drumming didn't repeat itself. The players didn't stick to a format or formula.

There's so many ways you can play one chord progression that the repetition isn't ever exactly the same.

Every comic can report a few 'gift from the gods' moments.

Sometimes in the past when I was going to perform a piece again I would listen to old recordings and try to reproduce the material. This time I realized that carrying around old information, trying to get everything in, and still be in the moment just doesn't work.

But there was no specific discussion when we came to make 'Hypnotic Eye' that were going to draw from a specific part of the well, because each song just comes in from wherever it comes. If it fits into a certain bag or feel, I think generally thats an accident!

I love being an idiot, and acting lets you be an idiot.

When I wrote 'Grand Illusion,' I was making it up as we went along. I wrote this stuff and tried to do the best job I could.