Martin Scorsese Quotations

Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.

I'm re-energized by being around people who mean a lot to me.

I always say that I've been in a bad mood for maybe 35 years now. I try to lighten it up, but that's what comes out when you get me on camera.

I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters.

Zombies, what are you going to do with them? Just keep chopping them up, shooting at them, shooting at them.

I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god... I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.

It's hard to let new stuff in. And whether that admits a weakness, I don't know.

Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It's the nature of the process.

People want to classify and say, 'OK, this is a gangster film.' 'This is a Western.' 'This is a... ' You know? It's easy to classify and it makes people feel comfortable, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter.

There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.

I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me.

One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.

If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?

You make a deal. You figure out how much sin you can live with.

My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else.

People have to start talking to know more about other cultures and to understand each other.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

We can't keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don't know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?

It's interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.

There are two kinds of power you have to fight. The first is the money, and that's just our system. The other is the people close around you, knowing when to accept their criticism, knowing when to say no.

A lot of what I'm obsessed with is the relationship and the dynamics between people and the family, particularly brothers and their father.

Every year or so, I try to do something; it keeps me refreshed as to what's going on in front of the lens, and I understand what the actor is going through.

People say you should do it this way, someone else suggests that, yes, there's financing, but maybe you should use this actor. And there are the threats, at the end - if you don't do it this way, you'll lose your box office; if you don't do it that way, you'll never get financed again... 35, 40 years of this, you get beat up.

All my life, I never really felt comfortable anywhere in New York, except maybe in an apartment somewhere.

If it's a modern-day story dealing with certain ethnic groups, I think I could open up certain scenes for improvisation, while staying within the structure of the script.

And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things.

When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.

Most people have stereo vision, so why belittle that very, very important element of our existence?

What the Dalai Lama had to resolve was whether to stay in Tibet or leave. He wanted to stay, but staying would have meant the total destruction of Tibet, because he would have died and that would have ripped the heart out of his people.

There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of this rut.

I grew up within Italian-American neighborhoods, everybody was coming into the house all the time, kids running around, that sort of stuff, so when I finally got into my own area, so to speak, to make films, I still carried on.

The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people.

If I'm not complaining, I'm not having a good time, hah hah!

I can't really envision a time when I'm not shooting something.

Young film makers should learn how to deal with the money and learn how to deal with the power structure. Because it is like a battle.

My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house.

I always wanted to make a film that had this sort of Chinese-box effect, in which you keep opening it up and opening it up, and finally at the end you're at the beginning.

Hong Kong cinema is something you can't duplicate anyway.

Food tells you everything about the way people live and who they are.

It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily.

I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.

I happen to like vampires more than zombies.

Death comes in a flash, and that's the truth of it, the person's gone in less than 24 frames of film.

I didn't realize there are generations who do not know about the origins of film.

Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.

I grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American - more Sicilian, actually.

There was always a part of me that wanted to be an old-time director. But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro.

Very often I've known people who wouldn't say a word to each other, but they'd go to see movies together and experience life that way.

You gotta understand, when moving images first started, people wanted sound, color, big screen and depth.

I do know that some Buddhists are able to attain peace of mind.

I'm going to be 60, and I'm almost used to myself.

Eradicating a religion of kindness is, I think, a terrible thing for the Chinese to attempt.

Some of my films are known for the depiction of violence. I don't have anything to prove with that any more.

You never know how much time you have left.

I mean, music totally comes from your soul.

If we just sit and exist, and understand that, I think it will be helpful in a world that seems like a record that's going faster and faster, we're spinning off the edge of the universe.

Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.

I'm sad to see celluloid go, there's no doubt. But, you know, nitrate went, by the way, in 1971. If you ever saw a nitrate print of a silent film and then saw an acetate print, you'd see a big difference, but nobody remembers anymore. The acetate print is what we have. Maybe. Now it's digital.

I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.

I think when you're young and have that first burst of energy and make five or six pictures in a row that tell the stories of all the things in life you want to say... well, maybe those are the films that should have won me the Oscar.

My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward.

Can a film really change anything? I mean, what was the last time? Maybe the Italian neo-realists, where they became the voice and the heart and the soul of Italy, a nation that had been destroyed. I don't know.

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

Being a father at a later age is different from when I had my other two daughters when I was in my 20s and 30s. If you're in your 60s and you're with the kid every day, you're dealing with the mind of a child, so it opens up that childishness in you again.

I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don't put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work.

I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.

On every film you suffer, but on some you really suffer.

When I'm making a film, I'm the audience.

I love the look of planes and the idea of how a plane flies. The more I learn about it the better I feel; while I still may not like it, I have a sense of what is really happening.

Well, I think in my own work the subject matter usually deals with characters I know, aspects of myself, friends of mine - that sort of thing.

I know there were many good policemen who died doing their duty. Some of the cops were even friends of ours. But a cop can go both ways.

There are times when you have to face your enemies, sit down and deal with it.

I don't really see many people... don't really go anywhere either.

I was born in 1942, so I was mainly aware of Howard Hughes' name on RKO Radio Pictures.

More personal films, you could make them, but your budgets would be cut down.

I also saw the Dalai Lama a few times.

I don't think there's a subject matter that can't absorb 3-D; that can't tolerate the addition of depth as a storytelling technique.

I go through periods, usually when I'm editing and shooting, of seeing only old films.

I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.

I loved the idea of seeing the world through a boy's eyes.

If everything moves along and there are no major catastrophes we're basically headed towards holograms.

The best I can do is to make a film every two years.

The bottom line is, I tend to be going back to older and older music.

The fact that food plays such an important part in my films has everything to do with my family.

The term 'giant' is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.

You've got to understand when a collaborator isn't satisfied anymore.

I don't agree with everything he did in his life, but we're dealing with this Howard Hughes, at this point. And also ultimately the flaw in Howard Hughes, the curse so to speak.

I mean I have a project that I have been wanting to make for quite a while now; and basically, it's a story of my parents growing up in the Lower East Side.

I think there's only one or two films where I've had all the financial support I needed. All the rest, I wish I'd had the money to shoot another ten days.

I think what happened there was just the budget would be too big to build these sets because nothing really exists here in New York of that period; you have to build it all.

It did remind me of something out of Greek mythology - the richest king who gets everything he wants, but ultimately his family has a curse on it from the Gods.

The Five Points was the toughest street corner in the world. That's how it was known. In fact, Charles Dickens visited it in the 1850s and he said it was worse than anything he'd seen in the East End of London.

The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?

Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.'

Sometimes when you're heavy into the shooting or editing of a picture, you get to the point where you don't know if you could ever do it again.

I've seen many, many movies over the years, and there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to continue to make films.

Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.