Quotes By Martin Scorsese

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

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.

I make different films now.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The young people today are the 21st century.

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

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

I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.

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!

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

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

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

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 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 also saw the Dalai Lama a few times.

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.