Quotes from Martin Scorsese

All I can do is try to do the best work I can. I need to work, I like to work... although I complain about it, but I do like it - and I just need to make the best film I can.

On the one hand, you're the same person, but as you get older, you change somewhat, and you never know how it's going to affect your work.

You have to put yourself in a situation, a lifestyle, that makes you do the work. Even if it's a monastery.

Young film makers should learn how to deal with the money and learn how to deal with the power structure. Because it is like a battle.

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.

I didn't realize there are generations who do not know about the origins of film.

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

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.

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

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

Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It's the nature of the process.

There are times when you have to face your enemies, sit down and deal with it.

It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily.

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.

Some of my films are known for the depiction of violence. I don't have anything to prove with that any more.

Most people have stereo vision, so why belittle that very, very important element of our existence?

I know there were many good policemen who died doing their duty. Some of the cops were even friends of ours. But a cop can go both ways.

Well the thing is that the New York of 1846 to 1862 was very different from downtown New York now. Really nothing from that period still exists in New York.

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.

And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things.

Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.'

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

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.