Martin Scorsese quotes
Born
November 17, 1942, Queens, New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation
Director, producer, screenwriter, actor.
Martin Scorsese is an American director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and film historian, whose career spans more than 50 years.
Movies
Cape Fear (1991)
Casino (1995)
Goodfellas (1990)
Hugo (2011)
Raging Bull (1980)
Taxi Driver (1976)
There’s no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.
– Martin Scorsese
I mean, music totally comes from your soul.
– Martin Scorsese
You never know how much time you have left.
– Martin Scorsese
I grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American – more Sicilian, actually.
– Martin Scorsese
If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?
– Martin Scorsese
Death comes in a flash, and that’s the truth of it, the person’s gone in less than 24 frames of film.
– Martin Scorsese
Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you’re working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.
– Martin Scorsese
It’s hard to let new stuff in. And whether that admits a weakness, I don’t know.
– Martin Scorsese
I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
– Martin Scorsese
As a child I had terrible asthma.
– Martin Scorsese
I think what happened there was just the budget would be too big to build these sets because nothing really exists here in New York of that period; you have to build it all.
– Martin Scorsese
I didn’t realize there are generations who do not know about the origins of film.
– Martin Scorsese
Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It’s the nature of the process.
– 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.
– Martin Scorsese
Zombies, what are you going to do with them? Just keep chopping them up, shooting at them, shooting at them.
– Martin Scorsese
On every film you suffer, but on some you really suffer.
– Martin Scorsese
More personal films, you could make them, but your budgets would be cut down.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese
Some of my films are known for the depiction of violence. I don’t have anything to prove with that any more.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese
I’m re-energized by being around people who mean a lot to me.
– Martin Scorsese
A lot of what I’m obsessed with is the relationship and the dynamics between people and the family, particularly brothers and their father.
– Martin Scorsese
Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god… I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.
– Martin Scorsese
If it’s a modern-day story dealing with certain ethnic groups, I think I could open up certain scenes for improvisation, while staying within the structure of the script.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese
It’s very good for me to remember what actors go through.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese
You gotta understand, when moving images first started, people wanted sound, color, big screen and depth.
– Martin Scorsese
My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward.
– Martin Scorsese
My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.
– Martin Scorsese
You make a deal. You figure out how much sin you can live with.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese
People have to start talking to know more about other cultures and to understand each other.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese
I happen to like vampires more than zombies.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese
People want to classify and say, ‘OK, this is a gangster film.’ ‘This is a Western.’ ‘This is a… ‘ You know? It’s easy to classify and it makes people feel comfortable, but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t really matter.
– Martin Scorsese
It’s interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.
– Martin Scorsese
Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.
– Martin Scorsese
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.
– Martin Scorsese