Nicole Byer Quotes

Sometimes people have this notion that improvisation is simply intuitive leaping into the unknown.

I like to improvise.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

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

I'm not thinking about what needs to be on the radio. I'm not thinking about anything other than - I'm just going to let this music come out of me and not have any sort of preconceived notion of what I should do. I'm just going to do it.

Without a band, I'm much more free to improvise.

My crutch was, in improvs, when in doubt, play insane, because you didn't have to excuse anything that came out of your mouth. It didn't have to make sense.

I like not knowing what's around the corner. It's always been that way, and maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm an actor.

Spontaneity is everything to me, working without a net.

What I love about jazz is the improvisation, the fact that you never know what's going to happen next.

There's a certain amount of joy in playing a character in the moment and not knowing what's going to roll out as it goes on. It's a bit like life, in a way.

It's good to be prepared, but spontaneity is very important - just to let yourself go and let it be whatever it is.

A lot of improvisation and freedom went into 'Pinata.'

In orthodox film-making, you never shoot sequentially - but with improv, obviously every move you make has a knock-on effect; it is a cumulative process. I have improvised, on the non-scripted 'Timecode.' It can become entirely indulgent: actors smashing crockery and competing verbally.

I never work out my leads. Everything I do is usually totally spontaneous. If someone says, 'That was good; play that again,' I'm not able to do it.

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.

Improvisation is terribly haphazard.

I think there are actors who are like, 'Okay, what am I doing, how am I doing it, what's the appeal? Tell me what to do, what are the exact lines from the script? Okay, I got it.' I am not that way. I would be a terrible bus driver. I'd want to be like, 'Oh, let's take this side road! Let's see what happens when we go down this back alley.'

I don't ever know where I'm going. Because one of the wonderful things about writing, which is different than working in programming, you don't need to know. You could just write and discover where you're going. And it's a great deal of fun.

I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote 'Search.' There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.

I love to play things that are out-of-the-box. It's just that I don't always get the chance to do it!

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

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