Henry Mancini Quotes

The model of a composer.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.

I would love nothing more to participate in a real struggle to find a character, and really delve into and develop a character. That's why I'm an actor.

The life that I live and the experiences that I have always affect what comes out of me creatively. I think that's what makes music real.

People look at technology as sometimes an end to things, and it isn't an end in certain cases. In the movie business, the act of creating in the art form of movies, the craft of movies is completely technical, and that's all it is.

I like to think about the quality, content, and concept for my music because I think these are the most important things and it just molds everything together.

Often the simplest song is the hardest to write.

Each character represents a different color on the big palette of what this ultimate painting is going to look like, who your guy is, and just try to be as honest and simple and real as you can possibly be. The outer trappings are incidental - costumes, period, makeup - all of that is rather insignificant at the end of the day.

When I made Illmatic, I was trying to make the perfect album. It comes from the days of Wild Style. I was trying to make you experience my life. I wanted you to look at hip-hop differently. I wanted you to feel that hip-hop was changing and becoming something more real.

With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.

To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye.

My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril

Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him. "Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her. "It takes a man with real heart" —he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest— "to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music. It's like making a stew. You put all these various ingredients in it. You season it with this. You put that in it. You put the other in it. You mix it all up and it comes out something neat, something that you created.

When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation.

if you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. ... you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentimemnt falls to sentimentality - you can write about life, but never write life itself.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Emotionally, it was the hardest 33 days of my life, but it was worth it because the result is that this album is 100 percent me. It’s heartfelt, real, bold, honest, vulnerable, hopeful, strong, poetic, bluesy, gritty, pretty, and simple.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

You learn from experiences, and I suppose that's where I color most of my music, from experiences.

I'll write and make chords with my voice sometimes if I don't have an instrument even though it takes a million times longer.

I look at the film without any music or sound. I try to grasp the story from the screenplay. I try to write to the novel or book if there is one. I try to create music that's honest and true to my heart for the story.