Quotes By Martin Scorsese

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.

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

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

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

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

I've always liked 3D.

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

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.

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?

Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people.

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

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

I happen to like vampires more than zombies.

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've been to North Africa many times.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I make different films now.

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 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.

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

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

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.

The young people today are the 21st century.

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

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