Eric Balfour Quotes

I love the idea of cooking, but I don't like using recipe books, so I'll put a mish-mash together, and it might be amazing by total accident, or it will be a catastrophe.

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

I really like to experiment. That's the only way I can work. It's instinctive.

If you're cooking and not making mistakes, you're not playing outside your safety zone. I don't expect it all to be good. I have fat dogs because I scrap that stuff out the back door.

You just go for it and see what works. There are no rules.

If we knew what we were doing we wouldn't be entertaining.

I'm a keen experimenter in the kitchen. With food, not with anything else!

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.

After I graduated from Brandeis, I took all the money I had in the world, which was $5,000, and I made a short film. I made every mistake you could possibly make. It was a total disaster as a piece of work, and yet, you know, it was ambitious in some way.

I love to cook when I have the time. I don't cook French or Mexican food with exact recipes. I just go to the supermarket and buy things that look good, and I mix it all together and invent something. Ninety-five percent of the time, I'm lucky. Sometimes not so lucky, and I say, 'Let's go out to dinner.'

I have a theory that the only original things we ever do are mistakes.

I didn't think; I experimented.

Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.

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

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

I ask all my actors to do two things: I ask them to fail for me, and I ask them to surprise me.

Usually, the things that are quickly slapped together become the big hits, rather than the ones you would painstakingly deliberate on.

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.

My favorite way to cook is to look in my cabinets and see what I have. That's the most fun. 'I don't have tomatoes, but I have this chili-garlic sauce from the Asian grocery store. Let's throw that in there and see how it affects my beef barley soup!'

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

Founders: there is no shame in failing, take pride in that you have the guts to try something new.

To be fair, on a good project, no matter whether it's improvised or scripted or meticulously prepared, or all up for grabs, it's always, always beyond the safety zone. Every project becomes interesting and exciting once you move beyond that routine. You always aspire to that. It's not that this improvisational mode is the only mode that facilitates that.

I'm really keen to try things. I love improvisation. It's quite exciting.

When young comedians ask me for advice that's the one thing I always say is if they're improvisers I'm like do improv, don't make that your sole thing. And at the end of the day when you do your best work you also just kinda, by definition flush it down the toilet and never do it again.

I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. . . . So long as I've learned something about why.