Improvisation is terribly haphazard. — Leo Ornstein
Improvisation is too good to leave to chance. — Paul Simon
Improvisation is the art of being completely O.K. with not knowing what the f— you’re doing — Mick Napier
Improvisation is not the expression of accident but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom of our very soul. — Yehudi Menuhin
There's always some room for improvisation. — Satyajit Ray
The minute you make a mistake - that's improvisation! — Barry Harris
No, improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. — Christopher Walken
I allow a lot of room for improvisation and funny stuff. I always feel planned. — Michael Bay
To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation. — Harvey Keitel
Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas. — Arnold Schoenberg
To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well. — Isaac Asimov
That's really what 'Jokers' is - an improv show. — James Murray
In my live show, it will feel like I'm making up everything as I go, and a lot of it I do. I riff with the audience and see what happens. — James Murray
As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets. — Fred Frith
Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation. — W. Somerset Maugham
Short Improvisational Quotes
Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise. — Ingmar Bergman
Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting what Mount Rushmore is to animation. — John Cassavetes
The best fighters are those who are calm under pressure and improvise when needed. — Joe Rogan
I'm flying by the seat of my pants, never creating with a thought to what's up ahead! — Akira Toriyama
Composing is improvisation slowed down. — Wayne Shorter
Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise. — George Gershwin
Improvisation is the courage to move from one note to the next. — Bobby McFerrin
Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself. — Cecil Taylor
In improvisation, there are no mistakes. — Miles Davis
Composition is selective improvisation. — Igor Stravinsky
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
Improvisation Quotes
The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. — Jane Jacobs
The secret of tango is in this moment of improvisation that happens between step and step. It is to make the impossible thing possible: to dance silence. — Carlos Gavito
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. — Sylvia Plath
My game is based on improvisation. Often a forward does not have the time to think too much. You have a second, rarely more, to decide whether to dribble, shoot or pass to the right or left. It is instinct that gives the orders. — Ronaldinho
In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. — James Clear
My school life was very much a wandering experience. I was having trouble in school and I was not making a lot of friends. So coming home and actually improvising on the piano and just coming up with melodies was an escape for me. — Josh Groban
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. — Pete Fountain
A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting. — Charlie Trotter
I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground. — John McLaughlin
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. — Brian McKnight
Improviser Quotes
Volleyball is one of the most interactive games going. It is a game of intuition, imagination, improvisation - but most of all, of reciprocity - of teamwork. There is no way to free-lance in volleyball. — Marv Dunphy
I wouldn't want the pressure of a Six Feet Under or the pressure of improvising like Curb Your Enthusiasm. — Robert Englund
The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts. — Ken Burns
If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn, and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach. — Viola Spolin
Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city. — Frank Gehry
The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas... and that negotiation is the art — Wynton Marsalis
But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden
Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when every second counts. It encompasses ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything. — Chris Hadfield
Preparation is the be-all of good trial work. Everything else - felicity of expression, improvisational brilliance - is a satellite around the sun. Thorough preparation is that sun. — Louis Nizer
I don't even think you should tell the audience you're improvising. It's like an apology in case it's bad : 'we're just making it up' If the improv isn't better than the rehearsed stuff, then you should just rehearse it. — Keith Johnstone
Improvisions Quotes
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. — John Cale
I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music. — Sonny Rollins
General improvisations often give actors an insight beyond their words by helping them to 'see the word' and achieve a reality for the scene. — Viola Spolin
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. — Alan Arkin
In improvisation, there is only one time. This is what computer people call real time. The time of inspiration, the time of technically structuring and realizing... the time of playing it, and the time of communicating with the audience, are all one. — Stephen Nachmanovitch
Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations. — August Strindberg
Improvisation is really not so much remembering things. And this is what I do when I play. I forget things. When I go on the stage, I want my mind to be a blank, so that I can - things can come into me without my knowing where they came from. — Sonny Rollins
When you start to kind of immerse yourself in that improvisation culture, you gotta be comfortable enough with your instrument to throw yourself into a really potentially dangerous situation. — Mike Patton
I improvise whenever I feel it's important, or whenever I think that something's there. It's nice to have a script that's so well-written that I don't have to improvise. I mean, I used to have to re-write whole movies; this is kind of nice. — Bill Murray
My younger brother and I have been writing together, mainly for fun, for years, but we've been improvising together since we were kids. Literally. — Ty Burrell
Jazz Improvisation Quotes
In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others. — Wynton Marsalis
You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it! — Art Tatum
In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds. — Steve Lacy
Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own. — Sonny Rollins
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life. — Amy Tan
I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late '50s, there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats. — Paul Bley
I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from improvising jazz. Something which seems to me remarkable is how unconscious the creative process is. You encounter a problem, but can't solve it. — Oliver Sacks
And more than anything, I like the improvisation of jazz. That's the same thing with DJ-ing. There's so much improvisation you can do with cuttin' and scratchin' that's reminiscent of jazz music, because it's all about how you feel. You're capturing a vibe and just going with it. — DJ Jazzy Jeff
We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians. — Chad Smith
As any jazz musician knows, it takes flexibility and adaptability for improvisation to create beauty. — Doc Childre
Improv Comedy Quotes
We're improv comedians, we're not necessarily actors, we don't come across that way. — Joe Gatto
We did sketch comedy, performed live improv, and then we made the transition to TV with 'Impractical Jokers.' — Joe Gatto
Jokers' is an improv show in disguise. — James Murray
I got involved in improv comedy. It settled me down when I was getting wild. I was sort of an evil teenager smashing up my cars and drinking and driving, let's just say, a lot. — Bruce McCulloch
We're an improv group and a sketch comedy group called the Tenderloins, that's our alter ego. — James Murray
There's sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy. — T. J. Miller
I still do live concerts all over the country - about four a month - with singing and characters and improv. It keeps me limber. I'll never lose that. And comedy is still the bread and butter. — Martin Short
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. — Albert Brooks
I love physical comedy. I love Oscar Wilde, I love Shakespeare comedies, I love improv. — Elizabeth Banks
he puppeteers really responded to it. Patrick Bistrow really responded to it, it's great fun to do improve comedy with puppets. — Brian Henson
Impromptu Quotes
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. — Mark Twain
The last time I went back to a girl's house for an impromptu house party I spent most of the night straightening out rugs, putting down coasters and alphabetising DVDs while all around me people got off with whoever was closest and gradually headed off to various rooms to make more mess, no doubt. — Jon Richardson
The impromptu reply is precisely the touchstone of the man of wit. — Moliere
Some of my Arcanum bunkmates taught me a card game called dogs-breath. I returned the favor by giving an impromptu lesson in psychology, probability, and manual dexterity. I won almost two whole talents before they stopped inviting me back to their games. — Patrick Rothfuss
J.L. Moreno was a pioneer of twentieth-century theater and psychotherapy. A remarkable work, Impromptu Man should be required reading for therapists and dramatists alike. — Jeffrey K. Zeig
My spirituality is parochial, terrestrial. I do qualify as a W.I.T.C.H. , but my irrecular practice and impromptu rituals don't aim at producing any dramatic results except, perhaps, in me. — Stephanie Mills
I don't know about you, but I call impromptu vomiting harm. — Karen Marie Moning
The very best impromptu speeches are the ones written well in advance. — Ruth Gordon
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell. — Mark Twain
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of improvisational quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about improvisational to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of improvisational quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
