Walter Matthau Quotes

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

I am very much a seat-of-the-pants actor. I will prepare when I have to. But I like being unprepared.

Life isn't a science. We make it up as we go.

Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.

Dealing with the unknown, the unexpected, is a reflection for me musically of what's happening in the world, because people are learning how to dialog with each other without any past strategy or any kind of formula from the past.

When I go onstage, I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know what's going to come out of my mouth. It's one of those questions where any and everything is possible. I literally could be talking about somebody I was hanging out with two seconds ago or something from the news. Literally, there's really no rhyme or reason for it. I want to be free flowing like that.

When I do a take, I very often try things that I haven't planned to try to see if I can pull it off.

I don't worry too much about the script, I just ad lib, like Pearl Bailey.

I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.

You just keep playing. If someone special comes along and organizes it in a new way, then you'll have another approach and everybody will jump on it to try to learn.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

With theatre, you have to be ready for anything.

No one set that I ever do is the same. I mean, if I go to a comedy club, and I perform three sets, all three sets are different because anything can happen in between sets.

You can't plan everything - if I did a performance exactly how I rehearsed it, it would be so boring.

You must plan to be spontaneous.

The whole thing about doing TV is that you never know what's going to happen. You just have to go with it and go with the flow.

I don't do the same show on any two nights.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

I wish to God I was organized enough to tell you that, 'Yes, there will be 14 books, and this one will go here, and that one will go there'... but to be honest, I hardly know what I'm going to do when I get up in the morning.

Life is about making plans from which you deviate, almost always. If you are lucky, you do come up with a plan.

A lot of my work is a matter of reacting to surprises in life.

The whole thing about the way I approach work is to be surprised by an opportunity when it comes up. So I have no idea what I will be doing next, and I kind of like that.

There is no facet of my professional life that doesn't require or request improvisation.

I think if you're trying to be funny, sometimes you're bending a piece of metal in a direction it doesn't want to go. And sometimes comedy just needs to find itself.

The essence of play is that the sequence of actions is fluid and scattered.