Quotes By Martin Scorsese

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

I still dislike phones, yeah!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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 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.

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

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