Impromptu Speech Quotes

A politician must often talk and act before he has thought and read. He may be very ill-informed respecting a question; all his notions about it may be vague and inaccurate, but speak he must; and if he is a man of talents, of tact, and of intrepidity, he soon finds that, even under such circumstances, it is possible to speak successfully.

Churchill has spent the best years of his life preparing impromptu remarks.

If I'm off the teleprompter, management doesn't get to see what I'm going to say.

I didn't write my speech until the night before, and even then I refused to write it out like I would say it, preferring to keep cribbed notes I could come back to if necessary. I wanted this to feel like a conversation because it was what I wanted to say that mattered, not how it looked on paper.

It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?

I would say that if you don't feel like talking to the crowd something is wrong and if you force yourself to talk to them things will happen and to that extent things aren't choreographed.

You're in front of an audience and thinking off the top of your head - you're going to say things that offend people sometimes. Sometimes I'll be driving home, and I'll be like, 'Oh, crap, I shouldn't have said that.'

I say 'here's the thing' a lot, both to alert people that I'm about to say something important and to give myself a moment to figure out what that important thing might be, because my head is so often completely empty.

I'm terrible at speaking extemporaneously about my work - I get completely tongue-tied and consumed with fear.

The best and most telling speech is not the actual impromptu one but the counterfeit of it.

I'm a talk-show junkie. I'd rather listen to real folks stumbling to express their own thoughts than to polished puppets reading what others have written.

Standing in front of a microphone where every word or every slip that you make, especially in these times, is with you forever - you want to say the right thing. I fell into having to extemporize, and it came okay because of tools I've learned. I said [to myself], "Remember [to mention] mom and dad."

Extemporaneous and oral harangues will always have this advantage over those that are read from a in manuscript: every burst of eloquence or spark of genius they may contain, however studied they may have been beforehand, will appear to the audience to be the effect of the sudden inspiration of talent.