Improvising Quotes

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.

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.

A person improvising is sometimes very fortunate that just at that second things coincide.

When I worked with Robin Williams, now there is improv! He is just as funny as you think he is. We did at least five or six takes of every scene, improvising every scene differently. He was a riot.

Even when I was in school shows, in elementary school doing plays, I'd always go off book and start improvising.

I was improvising before I was reading music. I was just trying to play things on the clarinet by ear. I think my ear is one of my greatest assets.

Improvising things is always changing. A lot of momentum.

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.

When we were doing 'Freaks and Geeks', I didn't quite understand how movies and TV worked, and I would improvise even if the camera wasn't on me. I thought I was helping the other actors by keeping them on their toes, but nobody appreciated it when I would trip them up. So I was improvising a little bit back then, but not in a productive way.

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.

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.

A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef's book about improvising but a real home cook's book with a real home cook's pantry, supermarket ingredients, that sort of thing.

There are certain actors who are very good at improvising, like Dustin Hoffman and Glenda Jackson.

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.

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

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.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

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.

The trouble with the jokes is that once they're written, I know how they're supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I'm more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work.

I love improvising.

Even if you're improvising, the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you make those improvisations successful. It really helps to have a certain amount of knowledge about musical structure.

You're just sort of searching for this "thing" and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

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.

No, improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing.

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.

We're improvising a lot of this, which amazes people.