Martin Scorsese quotes

Martin Scorsese is an acclaimed American film director, producer, and screenwriter known for his influential work in cinema. His movies often explore themes such as crime, guilt, and redemption, and feature innovative storytelling techniques. He has received numerous awards and is widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Here are 97 of his quotes:

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

Martin Scorsese

Mean Streets dealt with the American Dream, according to which everybody thinks they can get rich quick, and if they can't do it by legal means then they'll do it by illegal ones.

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 always tell the younger film-makers and students: Do it like the painters used to...Study the old masters. Enrich your palette. Expand the canvas. There's always so much more to learn.

Martin Scorsese

I don't really see a conflict between the church and the movies, the sacred and the profane...there are major differences, but I could also see great similarities...Both are places for people to come together and share.

Martin Scorsese

Movies touch our hearts, and awaken our vision, and change the way we see things. They take us to other places. They open doors and minds. Movies are the memories of our lifetime. We need to keep them alive.

Martin Scorsese

I don't think there is any difference between fantasy and reality in the way these should be approached in a film. Of course if you live that way you are clinically insane.

Martin Scorsese

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.

Martin Scorsese

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.

Martin Scorsese

There is no such thing as pointless violence. City of God, is that pointless violence? It's reality, it's real life, it has to do with the human condition. Being involved in Christianity and Catholicism when I was very young, you have that innocence, the teachings of Christ. Deep down you want to think that people are really good - but the reality outweighs that.

Martin Scorsese

More personal films, you could make them, but your budgets would be cut down.

Martin Scorsese

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

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 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 love the look of planes and the idea of how a plane flies. The more I learn about it the better I feel; while I still may not like it, I have a sense of what is really happening.

Martin Scorsese

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.

Martin Scorsese

I also saw the Dalai Lama a few times.

Martin Scorsese

I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.

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

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

Martin Scorsese

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

Martin Scorsese