Lucien Bourjeily Quotes

Expression and the right to express is vital, anyone can be artistic.

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

It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.

You know what the material is so that you never play it the same way twice.

I love art so much because of curiosity. At the start of a painting, I know 10 percent of what the painting will be, and then I have to improvise the whole thing.

Jazz is pretty much the freest thing you can be a part of. It's the closest thing I can get to flying. It's fun, interactive. In its own way, it's a sport.

In the performance sense, I find that interpretation is improvisatory in nature. You can go anywhere with an interpretation on any given day.

You know, we never really know what we're going to write next. Which is part of the excitement when we go in and do a new album. No battle plan, we just go in and do it and what comes out, comes out.

The world is a slightly better place for having improvisation in it than it was before. There's something about it that says something positive about the human spirit, that a bunch of people can get together and by following a few simple traffic rules can create art and can entertain an audience and can thrill and exalt each other.

I love to create something new every night onstage; that makes a big difference.

As improvisers, we're acting as composers in front of people.

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.

It may seem like improv because it flows quite naturally, and a little bit of leeway for improvisation is good, but you have to be judicious with it. So it's good, but sometimes people deify it. You can't improvise your way out of a paper hat.

When I'm painting outdoors, I only have time to think about what I'm saying, not how I'm saying it.

On stage you're free. You can say and do things that if you said and did any place else, you'd be arrested.

Freedom of expression is a very essential condition for me to make any art. Also, it is an essential value for my life. I have to protect this right and also to fight for the possibility.

Improvisation helps because you get what's on the page and you make it a little more palatable to your tongue. And that's the beauty of creating and being spontaneous. That's the way I love to work.

Jazz is a state of mind. There's no boundaries.

There are no wrong notes.

I write and rewrite and memorize, and then inject my performance with improvising and spontaneity, because if something feels too rehearsed, it's not going to be fun.

The biggest thing that comes out of improv that gets built on is just character traits. You know, for me the singing was born out of improv.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

A working artist is a playing artist.