Quotes About Improvisation

At the age of 16, I ran from my house, did odd jobs till l landed work on television and then in film industry. My first job was at an STD booth in Delhi. Then I came to Mumbai, where I distributed DVDs, and that is when I got my first TV show offer, 'Left Right Left.' I have never planned things in my career.

I love good TV shows, but it's not what I do. I kind of sculpt my films as I go along. And TV is all about writing, so you just shoot, shoot, shoot what's written.

Here's the truth. Your teens and twenties are your Plan A. At 50, you're assessing whether Plan B or Plan C or any of the other plans you hatched actually worked. Your sixties and seventies, they're an improvisation.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.

I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.

You know what the material is so that you never play it the same way twice.

I don't like improvising on camera, particularly, but very often, a scene will not be working, and you rehearse it once or twice, and you realize something's missing. So I'll play with it until it makes sense.

I never know what I'm going to talk about until I get on stage. I never give the same lecture twice, which is why I'll have people follow me from place to place like Deadheads.

When I sing a tune, the lyrics are important to me. Most of the standard lyrics I know well. And as soon as I hear an arrangement, I get ideas, kind of like blowing a horn. I guess I never sing a tune the same way twice.

Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.

The hardest thing is that I never do anything the same way twice, and when I'm on the air, I'm very unscripted, and I'm very comfortable in that role. So me being scripted is not a comfortable place for me.

Comedy is surprise. Comedy is not something that you can, necessarily, do twice.

The rule is to try and never play the same thing twice when you have the freedom to do that in the song.

It took me forever, learning improvisation, because I had studied with Lee Strasberg - I dropped out of Chicago and went to his classes in New York for a couple of years, once or twice a week. What I didn't realize was I was learning directing because he wasn't all that good about acting, not for me.

I don't know what another actor is going to give me, on the day, and I don't want to be so hard and fast in my technique that I'm not open to what's coming.

About 70 percent of everything is really sketched out on my keyboard beforehand, because I do want accidents to happen in the studio.

The worst thing to happen at the Oscars would be if nothing happened. You want something unscripted, something to riff on, something kinda out there.

I don't write [screenplay character] biographies beforehand. I usually go in knowing some sequences: this is where I want to start, this is where I want to end.

Many times, when a director reads a script and wants somebody who says 'Far out', then they let me do what I want with it and that's usually more interesting for an actor.

The funny thing is that I'm not a planner. I have no idea what I want to do in the interim of that 50 years, but I tell ya: That's where you'll find me in my last performance.

We allow the actors to do whatever they need to do or say to accomplish the goals that they want to accomplish.

With stand-up, you can be as freeform as you want to be. You can say what you want, how you want, at any moment without constraint.

I have this habit of asking 'why do you want to do it?' and then interrupting them to say, 'here's why you want to do it.' Because it's in the 'yes...and' spirit [rule of improvisation].

So I don't really have a clear plan, in terms of music, as to where I want to head in the future.