Improvisation Quotes

169 quotes by 148 authors

I love improvisation. You can't blame it on the writers. You can't blame it on direction. You can't blame it on the camera guy... It's… — Jonathan Winters
Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You… — John Zorn
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,… — John Zorn
Iâ€™m going to break one of the rules of the trade here. Iâ€™m going to tell you some of the secrets of improvisation. Just rememberâ€”itâ€™s… — James Beard
Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way — Paul Theroux
The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and… — Frank Zappa
When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. "I can't do this,"… — Patti Smith
First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions… — Michel de Certeau
He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching… — William Golding
Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on… — Mary Catherine Bateson
Life is an improvisation. You have no idea what's going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. — Stephen Colbert
Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself. — Cecil Taylor
Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play. — Ahmad Jamal
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
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… — Wynton Marsalis
There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience. — Henri Matisse
Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own. — Sonny Rollins
I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music. — Sonny Rollins
You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it! — Art Tatum
Actor training should be broadly humanistic, involving the study not just of dramatic literature and theatre history, but of languages, literature, and history generally, and… — Richard Hornby

Who Wrote These Improvisation Quotes

148 authors contributed a total of 169 Improvisation Quotes, led by these top contributors: