I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is…

In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical…

— Ravi Shankar

I'm all about melodies, and I find myself improvising most of the time with lyrics. Then I stick to a couple of lyrics and…

— Sophie Thatcher

I don't think there's an improvised word in the movie. I hope not because I admire writing. Improvising is kind of gambling. It's just…

— Bill Nighy

I've always loved improvising. That's how I write songs. Creativity has an improvised element to it.

— Jamie Lidell

I just try to do as good job with the material as I can and play some jazz as well, some improvised music, and…

— Mose Allison

I enjoy the challenge of taking something which was not meant for the piano, distilling its essence and writing or improvising it for/at the…

— Michael Hersch

I started going to a piano teacher at 5 years old, but pretty soon I started picking things out on my own and stopped…

— Mose Allison

Touring with King Crimson wasn't a lot of fun for me. I had a lot of equipment, and when I was in improvised music…

— Jamie Muir

“Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense it’s improvised, it’s almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little…

— Don DeLillo

In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform…

— Ravi Shankar

I left school and couldn't find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I've always improvised, and stand-up…

— Robin Williams

I wasn't a jazz player, but a classical musician, and I improvised arrangements of popular songs using classical motifs.

— Nina Simone

You work very hard on the lyrics. Getting them to fit the contours of improvised melodies.

— Kurt Elling

Many times I'll improvise it, which isn't done a lot in movies or commercials. But a lot of my commercials are improvised.

— Christopher Guest

I've always been a jazz fan, but I don't write much about jazz, because I don't have the chops. But it's really, really hard…

— Robert Christgau