Top 44 Improvising Quotes

When we were making Speaking in Tongues and Remain in Light, we were jamming. From that we were taking the best bits and then recording and improvising on top of those.

Improvising political dialogue is not easy.

There was one thing Beethoven didn’t do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn’t improvising.

It was a shock to my system leaving ‘The West Wing’ and going to ‘Psych.’ I remember being like, ‘What are you doing?’ when James Roday first started improvising. Steve and the writing staff write it that way. They leave gaps.

I love improvising.

Working with Dominic Savage was an amazing experience. You don’t have a full script to follow so you’re more or less improvising and he tells you what he wants out of the scene.

I know there are some actors who are just brilliant at improvising and brilliant at just being in the moment and doing it there and then. I’m not one of those actors.

But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things.

I don’t have a fear factor. Well, not much of one. And I’m willing to risk quite a lot – as a comedian, you’re always risking a lot. You’re risking failure, especially if you’re improvising and going on TV shows trying to make comedy out of thin air. That is quite a risky business.

Improvising things is always changing. A lot of momentum.

Improvising is writing, too – there was no music and now there’s music. So that’s composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you’re making a compositional choice. I don’t know a serious performer who hasn’t made compositional decisions, who hasn’t engaged in the art of composition.

Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you’re doing. That’s a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising.

I wouldn’t want the pressure of a Six Feet Under or the pressure of improvising like Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.

I was 7 years old when I began composing. I began composing, improvising at the piano, the usual story.

I can’t imagine doing anything without being an improviser. I can’t imagine trying to write or act or direct without what improvising offers you.

Every day, you have to make three hours of music, just randomly improvising, and that’s a great way to weed stuff out.

Very early on, I started improvising. I was more interested in the music that came out of me than any music I heard.

I’m used to doing independent film where the style is a lot more casual. With improvising, you obviously find so much out on the day – and in a way, I feel more comfortable doing that.

I’ll probably never stop improvising.

If you’re improvising with Paul Reiser, man, you’d better hold on tight!

I think our ‘Reno’ cops are, basically, if you made us make fun of ourselves at a party. That is what we would do. We would do those characters and not really think about it. We didn’t develop the characters; everyone just put on a name tag and started improvising.

I was always playing the Hammond Organ back to front even during the days of the Nice, going back to 1968. Really what I was doing there, was choosing notes at random and trying to make some sense of them, improvising back to front.

Yeah, improvising only really works 100% when you’re with somebody.

I stopped being interested in improvisation, and I continue to not be that interested in it. Comedians can do it on a different level because they have a goal, but if you’re improvising something that’s dramatic, there’s not that much to be good at.

When I’m on stage, it’s a little world I’ve created where I’m sort of the thing, so I have total control over everything that happens. When we’re improvising, I’m with someone I totally trust. I know things are going to work out. I don’t have those guarantees in life. There are no consequences on stage.

My solo music – I get up onstage, I improvise and it’s my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we’re improvising together. Then it’s not my music; it’s our music.

Everything in ‘Satya’ was by chance. It was a film which just started evolving by itself. I just went mostly by instinct and kept on improvising on location, and the film just got made itself.

Certainly one of the more common experiences in the jazz field is discovering someone new. Improvising musicians are capable of being musical travelers, voyagers. We want to join in on whatever we hear. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

While you’re improvising, you may come up with something which will break him up. As soon as that smile comes out, you know that, hey, we’re having fun.

I love being onstage. I love the relationship with the audience. I love the letting go, the sense of discovery, the improvising.

I think it’s very important to live in the present. One of the great things that improvising teaches you is the magic of the moment that you’re in because, when you improvise, you’re in right now. You’re not in yesterday or tomorrow – you’re right in the moment.

Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds, but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me, but I think there’s a way to do it without it being a jazz record.

When you’re writing, you’re putting thought into what you want to express, and then you come up with it – it comes to you. When you’re improvising, it’s the same thing. You’re writing. You just say it out loud right then, instead of saying, ‘You think this might work?’

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major – capturing, reflecting and improvising.

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.

If the same phrase in the same place created the right effect, I was perfectly prepared to use it every time. I wasn’t worried that I wasn’t improvising.

On ‘Sunny,’ the main actors are adults, and we’re all friends, and we all have the same sense of humor, so there’s a lot of improvising.

Sometimes when you start improvising on stage, which I do a fair bit of, obviously you haven’t planned it. But to be honest, it’s not like I’m one of these blokes who is sitting at home pouring it all out and then does a different thing on stage.

In the U.S., it’s like, you start with a great script, and then on set – not everybody, but definitely in the Apatow group – you go off, and you’re improvising on camera. So while you’re on camera, you’re saying things that no one else has ever heard before during the actual take.

There are very few actors who are truly good at improvising; that’s a real skill.

All improv turns into anger. All comedy improv basically turns into anger, because that’s all people know how to do when they’re improvising. If you notice shows that are improvising are generally people yelling at each other.

The 12 years that I was improvising are why I got the number of commercials I got when I was in New York and why I got ‘The Devil Wears Prada,’ and it’s why I even got in the door for ‘Mad Men.’

When I do the roles, when I’m in the room and auditioning, I’ll ask the director if they’re cool with me adding stuff, or just improvising while we’re doing it. And I would say, like, 90 percent of the time, they say, ‘Absolutely.’