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Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be ‘wrong’, which is what our education encourages us to believe.

Keith Johnstone

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Keith Johnstone
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: February 22
Actor
Dramaturge
Film Director
Improviser
Playwright
Theatrical Director
University Teacher
Devonshire
Might
Believe
Effortless
Think
Encourages
Thinking
Perception
Unless
Imagination
Education
Wrong

More quotes by Keith Johnstone

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If you have a good idea, open your mouth and say something else.
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In a scene [where the improvisers must interact] without the letter S, the audience is waiting for you to lose - so they can laugh at you. Don't try to win.
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The best laughs are on the recognition of truth.
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Some people in this life think they're worth something, or that they have a right to things. I never thought I had a right to anything 'cause of the way I was broken as a child. And therefore I was sort of floating around and would get sucked into things.
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In life most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. Bad improvisers block action often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.
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Trying to do better is trying to be better than you actually are, and I don't think you can do that.
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Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they’re a little crazier than the average person. People understand the energy necessary to maintain their own shields, but not the energy expended by other people. They understand that their own sanity is a performance, but when confronted by other people they confuse the person with the role.
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I think my brain is much more intelligent than I am...so I tend to trust it.
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I was crazy about silent comedy - in the old days, and crazy about Japanese movies.
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I see a great lack of stories around. I bought six literary magazines and looked through them to see what people were doing. There wasn't a story in them. They were all about how poetic the feelings of the author were.
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I'm not against work, I think work is great, I work a lot but if you want to play, the consequences must not be important.
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I tell people not to do their best. I don't know when that started. Quite a while ago. Because I . . . when they're doing their best I don't get their best. So I try to persuade them to be average. Because if you're wonderful and you're average, you're still wonderful. If you're a bad improviser and you're average, you're what you are.
Keith Johnstone
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The improvisation had to be in public, because you only get value playing to strangers.
Keith Johnstone
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If people had no fear, you'd hardly need to have to teach them. It's the fear that screws everything up.
Keith Johnstone
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Where if you're in a universe where you have to accept ideas, you'll never know if your partner wanted the garbage you're handing them. They have to take it.
Keith Johnstone
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Suppose Mozart had tried to be original? It would have been like a man at the North Pole trying to walk north, and this is true of all of the rest of us. Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.
Keith Johnstone
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Every theatre worth anything has somebody in the middle of it who is driving it like Joan Littlewood with her theatre.
Keith Johnstone
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The improviser has to understand that his first skill lies in releasing his partner’s imagination.
Keith Johnstone
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My feeling is the moment the theatre is not full you have to do something else. But most people somehow think 'If we did it better, they would come'. No. They don't come.
Keith Johnstone
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Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more 'respectful' teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children.
Keith Johnstone