Bobby McFerrin Quotes

Often times, I'm surprised by what I'm writing or what I'm playing, and then that inspires me to keep going with it, so it ends up being a very adventurous process.

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.

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

Acting allows me the freedom to let go, to be in the moment, to be spontaneous. I no longer have the fear of losing, of failure.

When I was in primary school, I was given a five-line script in 'Anansi the Spider Man,' and I decided to just improv and make it my own. For a second, I felt like Kevin Hart because everyone was laughing. I just continued to do it. Why not?

The exciting part of acting, I don't know how else to explain it, are those moments when you surprise yourself.

Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.

I always say that I'm at my best when there's no example of what the character is supposed to be. I thrive when there's not much and I have to create it.

With Fincher, you can take chances and try things. And what happens is that any pretension and preparation you've done, all the square, intellectual work, you can't keep that up for 40 takes. It breaks down, and new things start popping up. This, for me, is the most exciting thing about film-making.

I think I'm actually much too shy to do any performance art. I admire the big swings those guys take, but I'm not a one-man band.

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

I was kind of nervous to put 'Learning' out: it's a lot different. That's who I am. I'm going to push the boundaries.

I think the best thing you can do for an audition is to just do your work, be creative. It's OK to be spontaneous.

I love improvisation. I mean, it's hard to edit, because things don't necessarily fall together - you have to find ways to give it a dramatic scope, shape. But it's so much fun.

The truth is, I've got a naturally outgoing nature, and I still have a great love for experimentation.

The musicians in the band, and myself as a performer, love the risks of the unpredictable and the feeling of jumping off cliffs musically.

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

If you have a good movie in hand and it is successful, you gain confidence to experiment.

One thing people always ask me is 'How do you play outside?' ... I have no idea how to teach that, but when I was discussing this with our bass player Jesse Murphy, he said 'tell them to go cliff diving'... In other words, when you're jamming, you have to take risks if you want to find new sounds.

There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.

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.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

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 had to learn to think, feel, and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life preserver, which sinks them. Nobody can drown in the ocean of reality who voluntarily gives herself up to the experience. Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.

So much of making movies is about discovery on the day, what you're figuring out. If you know everything going in, then it's not worth doing - it's already done.