Spontaneous Speaking Quotes

I'm not an ad-libber. If I'm asked to ad-lib, I can ad-lib forever and it's really fun to do that, but I find that well-written scripts are put together very carefully. Once you start to ad-lib and add words to sentences, there's a slacking that happens. When it's good writing, it's taut. I'm not judging people who do ad-lib.

Bush is a very poor impromptu speaker. He does fine in small groups but when speaking without a script in front of large groups or answering questions he wasn't prepped for, he has problems.

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.

Broadcasting is easy; you just talk until you think of something to say.

I give talks to theater arts departments, and I don't know what I'll say. I don't plan a thing. It's just the energy of these young people. They're the next generation, and what they have is very representative of how I felt when I was 19 or 20 or so. I'm really happy to be with them.

Extemporaneous speaking should be practised [sic] and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet there is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance.

I'm the only person who's ever opened the Oscars or done a spot on the Oscars without a script and having it on autocue.

We had an exercise in speech class in school, impromptu speaking, that I was always real good at.

Oh, I'm a great believer in the power of the pause. Radio is a bit brasher now. My style was slower. I just used to go in, open the microphone and say the first thing that came into my head.

I ad lib most of my dialogue. If I did remember my lines, it would be too bad for me.

I love the exhilaration of feeling a pull quote come out of your mouth. The words just taste better.

The word got out that I can ad-lib very well.

I'm liking the idea more and more of just standing up with a microphone and talking.

Reciting lines is hard; making stuff up is much, much easier.

I never know what I'm going to talk about until I get on stage. I never give the same lecture twice, which is why I'll have people follow me from place to place like Deadheads.