Phoebe Robinson Quotes

The slightest thing can ruin a scene, but you must be willing to take chances.

As an actor, I'm rather hit and miss; I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't.

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

Lots of comics try stuff out all year round, which is very sensible - I don't.

Give the composer time to experiment, time to try out ideas. Also, the time to fail. When the composer has very little time, the temptation is to reach for stock ideas - ideas they know will work and have worked in the past.

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

You do stuff that gets a reaction and you think 'that's a winner' and then it never sees the light of day. But the thing with improvisation is that 90% of what you come up with won't be used and for good reason. But you keep going for the occasional gem that you might come up with. You do a scene and a lot of the time. We wouldn't cut. So, you come up with something that might be funny and then you go, 'alright, what else'? So, you kind of throw stuff against the wall and see what happens. But you've got to be prepared to make a fool of yourself.

You're always on duty because you're in a constant state of observation. That's one of the challenges of being a comedian. I think one of the other challenges is that, whether we like it or not, it's a profession that requires failure. It doesn't just encourage failure. It requires it because it's all trial and error. You need to know what doesn't work to know what works.

I tell the actors that the biggest gift they can give me is to fail. And that the second gift they can give me is to surprise me.

I'm not a trained chef, so I end up making stuff up. It either turns out brilliant or an absolute disaster. I just go for it.

I think a lot of what you do in acting, and for the most part singing and dancing and everything, is trial and error. It's all about just seeing what works, and if it does, to use it, and if not, to throw it away.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

My methodology is not knowing what I'm doing and making that work for me.

It might be a huge hit, it might not; but you learn something doing it.

For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.

We shouldn't be afraid to fail- if we are not failing we are not pushing. 80% of the stuff in the studio is not going to work. If something is not good enough, stop doing it.

'Humans of New York' did not result from a flash on inspiration. It grew from five years of experimenting, tinkering, and messing up.

I try something new every night. It's an hour show; if it works I maybe try it a few more times and then move that off and try something new. It's a great workshop for me.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail

I've bombed on stage millions and millions of times. And that's part of it. You go up with a half-baked idea, and you bomb, and so what? Nothing bad happens if you bomb.

Sometimes I play as simply as possible, in one or two touches. But I also make bad decisions, I make mistakes, and I try too-complicated things.

I don't really know what I'm doing, to be honest. I come up with things, and maybe it works, and maybe it doesn't, and I try to learn from my castmates and director and from everyone.

Failing is part of my process. A new bit never works the first time. I figure I have to bomb 7 times to make it good. So I tweak it.

When I started building things, obviously I was pretty bad at it. You cant be good at it from the start, and I decided to just embrace that, roll with it, and turn it into something funny.