Quotes from Martin Scorsese

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.

Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.

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

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

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.

I don't like being in houses alone.

Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.

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.

What the Dalai Lama had to resolve was whether to stay in Tibet or leave. He wanted to stay, but staying would have meant the total destruction of Tibet, because he would have died and that would have ripped the heart out of his people.

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.

You've got to love something enough to kill it.

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

If everything moves along and there are no major catastrophes we're basically headed towards holograms.

The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?

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.

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 grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American - more Sicilian, actually.

I'm sad to see celluloid go, there's no doubt. But, you know, nitrate went, by the way, in 1971. If you ever saw a nitrate print of a silent film and then saw an acetate print, you'd see a big difference, but nobody remembers anymore. The acetate print is what we have. Maybe. Now it's digital.

There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.

I still dislike phones, yeah!

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.

The real truth, I thought, in terms of what faith is and what Christianity is.

You make a deal. You figure out how much sin you can live with.