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1 " The world is ruled by such dreams, dreams of impassioned hearts, and improvisations of warm lips, not by cold words linked in chains of iron sequence, --- not by logic. The heart with its passions, not the understanding with its reasoning, sways, in the long run, the actions of mankind. "
2 " I've always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel - or at least the kind of novel I'm attempting to write. You know,' he continued, extemporizing as he went along, 'first you take one note and explore it for a while, then another to discover its possibilities, then perhaps you get to the dominant, and pause for a bit, and it's only gradually that the phrases begin to form and the tabla joins in with the beat...and then the more brilliant improvisations and diversions begin, with the main theme returning from time to time, and finally it all speeds up, and the excitement increases to a climax. "
― Vikram Seth , A Suitable Boy (A Bridge of Leaves, #1)
3 " This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was mean to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no " meaning" beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as more electrical than ethical. "
4 " The law of chaos is the law of ideas,Of improvisations and seasons of belief.Ideas are men. The mass of meaning andThe mass of men are one. Chaos is notThe mass of meaning. It is three or fourIdeas, or, say, five men or, possibly, six.In the end, these philosophic assassins pullRevolvers and shoot each other. One remains.The mass of meaning becomes composed again. "
― Wallace Stevens , The Collected Poems
5 " He wouldn't perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradition who had been contaminated by the advent of the recording device and so insisted that all improvisations be saved for posterity. "
― David Cronenberg , Consumed
