Quotes By Martin Scorsese

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.

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

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

I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.

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

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

It's very good for me to remember what actors go through.

I still dislike phones, yeah!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 also saw the Dalai Lama a few times.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I'm an older generation.

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

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.

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 wish I could do everything in 3D.

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

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.

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.

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.

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