Quotes By Martin Scorsese

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I mean, music totally comes from your soul.

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

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

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

I'm very phobic about flying, but I'm also drawn to it.

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.

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

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.

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.