KEITH SAYS…
KEITH SAYS...
Here are some favourite quotes, a few notes and a paraphrase or two from Keith’s students, friends, and the internet.
Enjoy
The source and type of reference are cited. If I’m missing one of your favourite Keith quotes, let me know and we’ll include it. If any here are cited improperly, let me know and we’ll get that fixed too!
| QUOTE | SOURCE | TOPIC |
|---|---|---|
| "I Never Said That". & "That sounds like something I may have said." | Keith Johnstone | Keith Quotes |
| 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. | Internet | Education |
| Never kick over a row of Hell's Angels' motorbikes unless you're the hero of the movie. | Keith Johnstone | Narrative |
| Laughter is a whip that keeps us in line. It's horrible to be laughed at against your will. Either you suppress unwelcome laughter or you start controlling it. | Keith Johnstone | Human Nature |
| This is theatre, not the work-a-day world where people are mean spirited and drag themselves about with “marks of woe. | Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers | Theatre |
 | Nadine Antler had a button that said: "KEITH SAYS..." Her performance partner, Florian Toperngpong created it "as a bit of mischief" towards her, because she kept quoting Keith all the time. | "I am not sure Keith ever saw this button though," said Nadine. (He did. -SK) |
| The audience doesn't like players who seem stressed. They want you to be visibly in control. Theatre is an expression of vitality, but it's also a cave where human beings should feel secure. | Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers | Advice, Theatre, Audience |
| Wide-eyed students see everything in a positive light, and huge energy can be released. They’ll seem less afraid of the ‘space’ around them, and they’re likely to stop ‘judging themselves’. Remove defences in life and you increase anxiety: remove them onstage and anxiety diminishes. | Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers | Students, Fear, Human Nature |
| Those who say yes are rewarded by the adventures they have. | Keith Johnstone | Advice, |
| Many students will begin an improvisation, or a scene, in a rather feeble way. It's as if they're ill, and lacking in vitality. They've learned to play for sympathy. However easy the problem, they'll use the same old trick of looking inadequate. This ploy is supposed to make the onlookers have sympathy with them if they 'fail' and it's expected to bring greater rewards if they 'win'. Actually this down-in-the-mouth attitude almost guarantees failure, and makes everyone fed up with them. No one has sympathy with an adult who takes such an attitude, but when they were children it probably worked. As adults they're still doing it. Once they've laughed at themselves and understood how unproductive such an attitude is, students who look 'ill' suddenly look 'healthy'. The attitude of the group may instantly change. | Keith Johnstone | Human Nature, |
| It was largely my interest in art that had destroyed any life in the world around me. I'd learned perspective, and about balance, and composition. It was as if I'd learned to redesign everything, to reshape it so I saw what OUGHT to be there, which of course is much inferior to what IS there. The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education. | Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Education |
| An audience will remain interested if the story is advancing in some sort of organised manner, but they want to see routines interrupted, and the action continuing between the actors. | Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Narrative |
| My feeling is that a good teacher can get results using any method, and that a bad teacher can wreck any method. | Keith Johnstone | Education |
| One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I'd had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. If I'd have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond. | Internet | Education system |
| What a person is afraid to do, he does while possessed. | Internet | Advice, Human nature |
| My feeling is that sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence up because we don't want to be rejected by other people—and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way. | Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Human Nature, |
| My ‘failure’ was a survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my way out of the trap that my education had set for me. I would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from me than now. | Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Education system, Human nature |
| These ‘offer-block-accept’ games have a use quite apart from actor training. People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding. | Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Advice, Human Nature |
| Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged, This is because they accept all offers made—which is something no ‘normal’ person would do. | Keith Johnstone | Advice, Human Nature |
| The mime must first of all be aware of this boundless contact with things. There is no insulating layer of air between the man and the outside world. Any man who moves causes ripples in the ambient word in the same way a fish does when it moves in the water. | Keith Johnstone | Mime, Performance |
| The most repressed, and damaged, and ‘unteachable’ students that I have to deal with are those who were the star performers at bad high schools. Instead of learning how to be warm and spontaneous and giving, they’ve become armoured and superficial, calculating and self-obsessed. I could show you many many examples where education has clearly been a destructive process. | Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Education |
| In a normal education everything is designed to suppress spontaneity, but I wanted to develop it. | Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Education |
| Sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence up because we don't want to be rejected by other people - and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way. 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. Sanity has nothing directly to do with the way you think. Its a matter of presenting yourself as safe. | Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Human Nature |
| As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I'd lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age - just as a lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn't understand that clarity is in the mind. | Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Education, Youth |
| There are people who prefer to say 'yes' and there are people who prefer to say 'no'. Those who say 'yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say 'no' are rewarded by the safety they attain. | Keith Johnstone | Advice, Human nature |
| None of us really grow up. All we ever do is learn how to behave in public | Keith Johnstone | Youth, Human Nature |
| Enjoy things even when you’re screwing up. | Keith Johnstone | Failure |
| The best laughs are on the recognition of truth. | Keith Johnstone | Humour, Truth |
| If you believe you’re good already, you don’t need to do extra stuff to impress us. Your best work comes when you’re absorbed; because then your ego is away. | Keith Johnstone | Advice, ego |
| ...the teacher picked a flower and said: ‘Look at the pretty flower, Betty.’ Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, ‘All the flowers are beautiful.’ ‘Ah,’ said the teacher, blocking her, ‘but this flower is especially beautiful.’ Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see!’ In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting. | Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Education |
| 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 | Truth, Advice |
| If you have a good idea, open your mouth and say something else. | Keith Johnstone | |
| The improviser has to understand that his first skill lies in releasing his partner’s imagination. | Keith Johnstone | Partnership, Collaboration, |
| Truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal. | Keith Johnstone | Truth, |
| Don’t come on to be funny – come on to solve problems. | Keith Johnstone | Advice |
| If it weren’t for fear, I wouldn’t have to teach you a damn thing. | Keith Johnstone | Fear, |
| An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He’s not making any decisions, he’s not weighing one idea against another. He’s accepting his first thoughts. | Keith Johnstone | Spontaneity, Obvious, Truth |
| Good impro can make you laugh, we love it, but soon the content is forgotten. Good scenes from The Life Game stay with you always. They haunt you. | Keith Johnstone | Improvisation, Life Game |
| 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. | Keith Johnstone | Advice, Narrative |
| Every time you go the way the audience expects, they’ll think you’re original. People laugh with pleasure at the obvious. | Keith Johnstone | Narrative, Obvious |
| I don’t even think you should tell the audience you’re improvising. It’s like an apology in case it’s bad : ‘we’re just making it up’ If the improv isn’t better than the rehearsed stuff, then you should just rehearse it. | Keith Johnstone | Advice, Performance |
| . Many 'well-adjusted' adults are bitter, uncreative, frightened, unimaginative, and rather hostile people. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that that's what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing. | Keith Johnstone | Education |
| An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He's not making any decisions, he's not weighing one idea against another. He's accepting his first thoughts. | Keith Johnstone | Truth, Obvious, |
| I think my brain is much more intelligent than I am...so I tend to trust it. | Keith Johnstone | Trust, intuition, intellect |
| 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. | Keith Johnstone | Failure, Advice |
| 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. | Keith Johnstone | Human nature, |
| At school any spontaneous act was likely to get me into trouble. I learned never to act on impulse, and that whatever came into my mind first should be rejected in favour of better ideas. I learned that my imagination Wasn't "good enough". I learned that the first idea was unsatisfactory because it was (1) psychotic; (2) obscene; (3) unoriginal. The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal.” | Keith Johnstone | Education, Truth, |
| Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be wrong, which is what our education encourages us to believe. | Keith Johnstone | Imagination, Education |
| Every theatre worth anything has somebody in the middle of it who is driving it; like Joan Littlewood with her theatre. | Keith Johnstone | Theatre, artistic management |
| I left my theatre the Loose Moose almost twenty years ago, and I hardly ever go back. Sometimes I go back to do a Mask class. They’re doing more of this than I was doing when I left. Often it’s the same improvisers but they’re older. And now, they don’t care if the theatre’s full or not. | Keith Johnstone | Theatre, Loose Moose |
| There was a Television network that advertised, "Time Well wasted." I don't want my time wasted. I don’t like that. I don’t like improvisation being pointless. | Keith Johnstone | Light Entertainment, |
| In my school, the library was forbidden. I was accused of turning on the radiator so that the [class]room was uninhabitable and the ceiling came down below; I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it. But then we were moved to the library. And there was a really boring history thing, about the Spanish Armada: how could you make that boring?!So I reached my hand out, and slid a book off to read under the desk, and it opened at King Lear Act Four Scene Six. I was astounded. I’d never seen language like it. I was awestruck. I think that may be one reason why I got involved in theatre. | Keith Johnstone | Education, Bio, Theatre |
| You can sort of trick people into being really good. Even if they didn’t know anything. | Internet | Teaching |
| 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 | Being Average, Human Nature, Advice |
| The foreword to Impro in Denmark is by Søren Iversen, who I taught long ago, he was a Danish director, after he left. He said he’d read about [Eugeny] Vakhtangov. I’m a fan of his. When he heard that Vakhtangov had lots of tricks, he thought this was very bad. But when he came to be my student, he realised it was very good to have a lot of tricks. You saw some this morning. | Keith Johnstone | Teaching, Education |
| Wherever you go it’s the same fear. And the same protective devices. There is one big error I think and partly my fault which is that a lot of things are taught to beginners which you can cast off later on. | Keith Johnstone | Fear, Advice |
| If you have a good idea, open your mouth and say something else. | Keith Johnstone | Spontaneity, planning, |
| 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 | Theatre management, Artistic direction |
| I was crazy about silent comedy – in the old days, and crazy | Keith Johnstone | Recommendations |
| The problem’s always been to deal with the fear. The fear ruins everybody really. | Keith Johnstone | Fear |
| Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be ‘wrong’, which is what our education encourages us to believe. | Keith Johnstone | Imagination, Education |
| If people had no fear, you’d hardly need to have to teach them. It’s the fear that screws everything up. | Keith Johnstone | Fear |
| 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. | Keith Johnstone | Play, Pressure |
| It's very hard to get an audience. So if you’re going to fill the theatre, you can’t just rely on old stuff. | Keith Johnstone | Audience |
| The improvisation had to be in public, because you only get value playing to strangers. | Keith Johnstone | Improvisation, Audience |
| When I consider the difference between myself, and other people, I thought of myself as a late developer. Most people lose their talent at puberty. I lost mine in my early twenties. I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children | Lawson Blake | Talent, Youth |
| We made a mistake. We just learned something. | Various | Failure, Education |
| Whenever my theater’s not full, I always panic and change everything until it’s full. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Theatre management |
| If I knew how to do improv, I’d stop doing it. I know improvisers who know how to do it, and they should stop. Good improv is like good sport, a tug of war between success and failure, a struggle. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Success, Failure, Knowing |
| People are trying to make rules. People make rules for beginners and then they apply the rules to everyone. People tell beginners not to say no, because they’re killing someone else’s idea. Why shouldn’t some ideas be killed? | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Rules |
| Beginning improvisers are trying to say something the audience can’t possibly think of. They think that’s more interesting, when actually the audience would like you to say what they’re thinking of. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Originality, Obvious |
| When taking suggestions, use the word “inspire” to have permission to reject audience suggestions. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Inspiration, Suggestions |
| The audience wants to see you screw up while staying happy, with a miracle thrown in every once in a while. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Failure, Audience |
| I think if you’re a bad improviser, you shouldn’t try to be a good improviser…Try to get up on stage without creating too much carnage. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Being Average |
| It’s worth emphasizing that if people succeed and look good in workshops, they’re probably not learning. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Failure, Educaton |
| People don’t like to be altered when they’re looked at. If you’re in public, you try to maintain the same aspect when people look at you more than once. The message is, “I’m not worth looking at.” But onstage the point is to be altered in front of people. Drama is one person changed by the other. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Human nature, being altered |
| If you’re afraid, you give off danger signals and the audience picks that up. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Fear |
| If you’re trying to give your partner a good time, you can break all the rules. If you’re afraid, you need to follow all the rules. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Partner, fear, benevolence |
| If everyone onstage is panicked, the best you can do is to be efficient. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Fear, Advice |
| Improvisers should be playful. If you’re being playful, you don’t care about what the audience thinks. It’s not nice watching improvisers work hard. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Play |
| If the show is good, the audience is slow to leave. Nobody will tell you the truth about whether the show is good, so you have to go by objective measures. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Audience, Quality |
| When beginning improvisers get into a car, it won’t go anywhere. But getting into a car is a promise. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Action, fear, Promises |
| Spontaneity is a trance state. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Spontaneity |
| It doesn’t matter if you’re afraid in life, it has to stop when you get onstage. (You get out of fear by making your partner happy.) | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Fear, Partner |
| I’m up to HERE with light entertainment. Every time you turn on the tv, there’s some kind of crap going on. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Light entertainment |
| When I’m advising you not to do your best, it’s the fruit of bitter experience. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Average |
| re: Maestro- You should never direct when it’s going well. It looks like you’re trying to get in on the glory. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Maestro, directing, ego |
| on tech: You’re supposed to make two serious fuck-ups in every show. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Tech |
| Keith talked about giving himself the game/challenge of getting people to uncross their arms when he’s teaching a class. | participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Teaching |
| Don’t fall on your knees and don’t let directors make you kneel too much. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Advice |
| People are afraid to go on the stage and act because they think that acting means showing emotion, but that’s backwards. Acting is generally supposed to accurately represent real life right? In real life the only time you TRY to show emotion is when you’re lying. So don’t try to show emotion when you’re on stage. Let the emotion take care of itself. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | emotion |
| Keith really differentiates between the ability to perform and the ability to construct what he considers to be a good scene. A good scene should have “something”. It should have a relationship and something should change. If not, then it should be super funny. But being a good improv performer (the ability to cheat out, and project, and seem relaxed, and be generally watchable) doesn’t mean you’ll make a good scene. | participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | |
| If there’s something latent that you can extract and bring out, then we’ve got something. If there’s nothing in the circle, you have to bring something from outside.” | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Scene, narrative |
| On benevolence- a warm occasion has a healing power. If you’re just negative, well, they’re already miserable and you’re just feeding their sadism. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | good nature |
| There’s no cheating in the theater. If it works, it works. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Good theatre |
| Status” is something you do, not something you are. If you’re high-status, you do things to other people. If you’re low-status, things get done to you. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Status |
| Remember: the audience laughs at stupid suggestions *because* the stupid suggestions are stupid. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Stupid suggestions, Audience |
| Actors tend to be scared. So theater keeps turning into a museum exhibit: They find something that works, and desperately stick to it. Don’t do this in improv. Keep it risky/dangerous — that’s why it’s fun! Keep testing your limits. | Quote, Paraphrase, or participant observation - HIDEOUT THEATRE WORKSHOP 2010 | Risk, relevant theatre |
| “Maybe when I’m ninety I’ll be invigorated - emerging fully formed from the head of Zeus, leaping from boulder to boulder, plunging into the foam, paddling to shore with a large fish in my teeth and one in each hand!” - Keith Johnstone 1933-2023 | Keith Johnstone said to Immanuela Lawrence. | Keith, aging |
| Storytelling is walking backwards into the unknown future. | Keith Johnstone | |
| "(...) Find yourselves SMALL motivations! | Keith during a workshop to Antoine Gaudin | Motivation |
| If anything can happen, there will be no structure. Most players (especially men?) try to trick the audience by not being obvious. Perform according to audience expectations. | Keith during a workshop to Antoine Gaudin | The audience, Anything happening |
| Think of The Shining, when young Danny is pedaling through the hotel corridors and the camera follows him. We expect something to happen to him! It’s typical of this kind of shot that sticks to the character. If one day you go down to the basement and a camera is following you closely, you’d better pay attention to the music... | Keith during a workshop to Antoine Gaudin | Where's the focus? |
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