A Quote by Cecil Taylor

Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.

Cecil Taylor

Quote Topics

Ability Improvisation Oneself Talk

Quote Author

Cecil Taylor
American - Musician
Born: March 15, 1930

I think one of the things that I took from Mel [Bochner] specifically was his ability to look at oneself and one's relationship to the history of art and the practice of art at arm's length, the ability to sort of clinically and coldly remove oneself from the picture and to see it simply as a set of rules, habits, systems, moving parts.

Kehinde Wiley

Most of my music is improvisation, and composition is improvisation. Even if I have a score, it is improvisation.

Yoshi Wada

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

Milan Kundera

Music making features real-time creation, real-time decisions and actions. It's basically improvisation, which is the stuff of everyday life. In the realm of discourse about music, improvisation is marginal, but in the realm of doing it, it's omnipresent. Strange distinction here: we're improvising all the time, but when we tend to talk about music, we tend to talk about objects that are fixed, like recordings, scores, pieces.

Vijay Iyer

If to talk to oneself when alone is folly, it must be doubly unwise to listen to oneself in the presence of others.

Baltasar Gracian

The two most important forms of intelligence are the ability to read other people and the ability to understand oneself.

Bruce Pandolfini

There are definitely some set topics I go onstage with and want to talk about, but there's also an element of improvisation and spontaneity that I like to bring to each performance and talk about uniquely in that room.

Hasan Minhaj

I would make a huge distinction between theater improvisation and film improvisation.

Christopher Guest

To write a book about improvisation is partly a contradiction in terms. Improvisation is spontaneous. It's in the moment.

Sally Schneider

Power, as human beings exercise power, to me means the ability to change: the ability to change oneself, the ability to change one's community. And the positive use of power is transformation of self and community toward a higher ideal, toward a healed world.

Katharine Jefferts Schori

Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.

Jean Cocteau

A lot of improvisation ends up being about just thinking outside of the box in the scene. It's not improvisation as much as it is quickness or making it real.

Jason Sudeikis

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own.

Sonny Rollins

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.