Improvising Quotes - Page 3

• ...this is my dilemma. I'm a guy who makes things up as I go along, so nothing is ever finished - there are so many layers. So when you solo, yeah, you might get into one thing, but then, hey, everything has implications! You can hear the next level. And that's how I feel about improvising - there's always another level.

  Sonny Rollins

  Guy, Next Level, Hey

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• 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.

  Stephen Colbert

  Character, Ideas, Two

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Yes, for me audio-visual performance has its roots in my experience working as an improvising musician and composer.

  Kurt Ralske

  Roots, Musician, Audio

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• I do a little improv in my shows. Kind of like our movie, I'll do beats and ideas of dialogue, but I think there's less pressure because it's a live show. If you mess up, the audience laughs because we don't really know what we're doing. But as far as shooting, that was very scary, trying to make a point and drive the film. It definitely helped improvising.

  Charlyne Yi

  Thinking, Ideas, Laughing

  Source: www.seventeen.com

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• If you're onstage and you're improvising and nothing's happening, people are racing for the door. But the director can go shopping later and pick up pieces and moments and insert them.

  Gary Cole

  Doors, Shopping, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I think everybody came into it with the understanding that they would go through an experience that is literally not by the book, that is not executing the script and then going home, but living and breathing these characters and being in the moment with each other, and improvising and creating a lot of present-tense intensity between characters.

  Oren Moverman

  Book, Home, Character

  "Rampart Director, Oren Moverman Interview". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• I did a smaller gig with an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. In one song, something wrong happened with the drum machine. I tried to cover up the mistake by playing faster and improvising a new song but it became crazy, and I had to admit it was all a mess.

  Violante Placido

  Song, Crazy, Mistake

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• In my case, I am improvising with existing sound files. I use an MSP patch that a friend of mine made, and you have to improvise when you use this patch. I don't use a guitar in performance anymore.

  Christian Fennesz

  Guitar, Sound, Use

  Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. March 1, 2002.

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• That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action.

  Twyla Tharp

  Action, Impulse

  Twyla Tharp, Mark Reiter (2003). “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life”, Simon and Schuster

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• Those are the rules. To improvise in a movie with other people, when they're following a script, everybody has to know what's going on. I think a line or two we might change. Certainly, I do. But I wouldn't call it improvising. I'd call it fudging the lines.

  Samuel L. Jackson

  Thinking, Two, People

  "‘The Man’ Interviews: Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy". www.hollywood.com.

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• The planet isn't improvising, it's creating dynamic tensions between complex living systems in a planetary choreography, a balancing act between physical, chemical, biological, environmental, and human components.

  DJ Spooky

  Creating, Environmental, Chemicals

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• I'm trying to be expressive on my instrument and conduct as I'm improvising. So I'm conducting with the melodies and the rhythms that I play. And so it's a very organic way. It's a lot like Charles Mingus played, cuing people in from what you play and how you play it rather than standing in front of a band, conducting and pointing.

  Joe Lovano

  Play, People, Trying

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• John Cassavetes was there at night while I was working. After they [with his friends] discussed as much live TV as they felt they needed to, they started improvising scenes just for the fun of it and one of those scenes everybody got very interested in and it turned into Shadows [1959]. That movie was entirely improvised.

  Gena Rowlands

  Fun, Night, Shadow

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I do a lot of improvising on movies, actually.

  John C. Reilly

  "Interview: John C. Reilly (Talladega Nights)". Interview with Devin Faraci, trouble.city. August 2, 2006.

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• When you're improvising, you're relying on this connection to creativity.

  Reggie Watts

  Creativity, Connections

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• If I'm improvising and I'm not doing well it's because I'm not listening very well. Either I'm overly concerned with something or I'm drifting or maybe I'm too stoned but I'm not getting a clear signal.

  Reggie Watts

  Listening, Signals, Drifting

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• When I'm at the piano, and I'm improvising some song about something, it usually oscillates between factual, absurd, and sincere.

  Reggie Watts

  Song, Piano, Sincere

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I found the recording sessions very freeing because you can really try things. When you're filming something, if you're improvising a film and you're wasting film and wasting a cameraman's time.

  Tina Fey

  Trying, Film, Found

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

  Billy Crystal

  Book, School, Play

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• 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.

  Stephen Root

  Thinking, Robins, Six

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• 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.

  Keith Emerson

  Nice, Trying, Notes

  "Readers recommend: songs featuring the organ" by Peter Kimpton, www.theguardian.com. October 29, 2015.

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• 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

  Determination, Mean, Tasks

  Chris Hadfield (2013). “An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth”, p.28, Pan Macmillan

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• ...I think of improvising as composing - fo me it's all about playing melodies. When I improvise, there's not a lot of real thinking going on, per se - it's more like riding a wave. and I know how to stand on the board

  Robben Ford

  Music, Real, Thinking

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• 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

  Music, New York, Jazz

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• The Beatles came and everybody forgot about everything else. That was a friendly, together, hip interpersonal music, introducing electric sustain, and it captured the imagination of everybody. So improvising, even though it was in a very rich period in terms of impact on the public, the '6Os were very hard times on players financially.

  Paul Bley

  Music, Hard Times, Player

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