Sergio Leone Quotes

Sometimes you make a record that is what you want to hear. I've made a couple of those, idealized creations of what I wanted to hear. Then there are records that are what you feel.

Everything I do is personal. I have never made a movie that didn't have very strong personal resonance.

I like to be able to understand the feeling of the director, that a film corresponds to something in his life. Otherwise, it doesn't interest me much.

A film reflects who you are as a building reflects the soul of its architect. I think what you feel and what you think and what you are is what the film is. It's not for me to talk about.

I need my 'art work' or 'entertainment work' or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person.

When you're writing songs for yourself, as all artists do, it's about 'me.' It's about what you feel and your emotions. You're trying to get something out of your system about your experiences.

I started writing poetry when I was six. I had this teacher who didn't believe the poems I'd bring in were mine because they were dark and sad. But I wrote about what I experienced in my childhood.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

It is the greatest reward for me to share my story, my art, and my work. And people receiving that and being thankful and grateful, it once again resonates deep within because it reminds me that I am so much bigger than being a drag performer.

Music has been there for me. Whether good or bad, it's the way that I process experience. As a listener and as a writer.

Sometimes I have some stuff in my head, man, you wouldn't believe. But I can go to the studio and talk about it. That's my way of releasing.

I feel like 'Amelie' is very much an extension of me. She's a contemporary woman who sees the world through her imagination.

I make art primarily for myself and to show my friends, so I guess it's important to make art that they can connect to.

In my films, a lot of the situations come from real life.

Cinema is a director's medium; it's his story and his vision. If it's a good story, people will connect to it.

I think the music that speaks to me the most is music that is personal. And that's the music that I'm trying to make.

I wrote about scenarios that I was going through and then disguised them.

Music can inspire immediate emotional reactions, even if the only person who hears it is the person creating it.

When you write, what's going on in your life shines through in the songs.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person.

Every stimulus becomes an opportunity to find fresh ways to express your personal vision.

I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience.

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)