Martin Scorsese quotes:

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.

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.'

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

It's hard to let new stuff in. And whether that admits a weakness, I don't know.

Can a film really change anything? I mean, what was the last time? Maybe the Italian neo-realists, where they became the voice and the heart and the soul of Italy, a nation that had been destroyed. I don't know.

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.

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.

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

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.

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.

Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.

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

I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.

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.

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

I always wanted to make a film that had this sort of Chinese-box effect, in which you keep opening it up and opening it up, and finally at the end you're at the beginning.

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

I mean, music totally comes from your soul.

If we just sit and exist, and understand that, I think it will be helpful in a world that seems like a record that's going faster and faster, we're spinning off the edge of the universe.

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

As you grow older, you change.

People have to start talking to know more about other cultures and to understand each other.

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

I loved the idea of seeing the world through a boy's eyes.

I go through periods, usually when I'm editing and shooting, of seeing only old films.

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

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 know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me.

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.

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.

I'm an older generation.

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

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.

We can't keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don't know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?

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

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.

As a child I had terrible asthma.

During Prohibition, Atlantic City created the idea of the speakeasy, which turned into nightclubs and that extraordinary political complexity and corruption coming out of New Jersey at the time. The long hand that they had-and maybe still do-even had to do with presidential elections.

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.

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 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.

I also saw the Dalai Lama a few times.

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.

Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god... I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.

Oh, the foghorns... even the foghorns, they're all brass. It's something by Ingrid Marshal called Fog Tropes. It's not a sound effect. It's an actual piece of music. If you listen to what's going on after he has a flashback about his wife you'll hear... it sounds like the humpback whales in a way. But it's all music. And we use it again later, too.

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.

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

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

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 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.

We cannot burn Mick Jagger. We want the effect, but we can't burn him.

The term 'giant' is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.

DAYS THAT I'LL REMEMBER is a lovingly assembled and beautifully written collection of conversations, observations, and memories of music, friendship, and days gone by. It's good to be back again with John Lennon, his beloved Yoko Ono, and his trusted chronicler and friend Jonathan Cott.

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.

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.

My films really have to be a part of a whole body of work that says something to me.

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.

When I was growing up in the mid-'50s, the Roaring Twenties were a huge part of the culture. There were a number of films and a bunch of television shows that dealt with the mythology of the underworld from that period.

Actually, I was rock climbing on this film at 7 in the morning. It was quite unique! But in any event, the colour of the leaves disturbed me so we had to work on that. On the other hand, I didn't want to drench it in a kind of depressing tone.

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.

You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.

The problem with anger is that it's so consuming. You've got to take it easy on yourself at a certain point.

I look for a thematic idea running through my movies and I see that it's the outsider struggling for recognition. I realize that all my life I've been an outsider, and above all, being lonely but never realizing it.

I'm in a different chapter of my life. As time goes by and I grow older, I find that I need to just be quiet and think. There have been periods when I've locked myself away for days, but now it's different - I'm married and we have a daughter who is in my office the whole time.

Vertigo is probably my favourite Hitchcock film and probably one of my favourite films of all time. It's a film that I'm obsessed with. I saw it on its first release in vista vision, projected in vista-vision, at the Capitol Theatre in New York. That moment when the nun comes up in the end... it's just an extraordinary shot.

The creation of the island, or the impression of the island, as it changes in the mind of the character also came in to play... there was another very important collaborator, Rob Legato, on special visual effects. And then ultimately there's Thelma Schoonmaker, who keeps me focused during the editing of the picture.

I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.

You don't make pictures for Oscars.

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

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

You gotta understand, when moving images first started, people wanted sound, color, big screen and depth.

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'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.

Zombies, what are you going to do with them? Just keep chopping them up, shooting at them, shooting at them.

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.

You've got to understand when a collaborator isn't satisfied anymore.

Hong Kong cinema is something you can't duplicate anyway.

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've been to North Africa many times.

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

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

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.

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.

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.

I was born in 1942, so I was mainly aware of Howard Hughes' name on RKO Radio Pictures.

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.

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

Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people.

I don't like being in houses alone.

If I'm not complaining, I'm not having a good time, hah hah!

[Action's] a Western thing. We think of the hero going into battle, rebelling against a government or an oppressor, but [in KUNDUN] action is nonaction or what appears to be nonaction. That's a hard concept for Western audiences. . . . We wanted to show a kind of moral action, a spiritual action, an emotional action. Some people will pick up on it; some won't.

[David Lean's] images stay with me forever. But what makes them memorable isn't necessarily their beauty. That's just good photography. It's the emotion behind those images that's meant the most to me over the years. It's the way David Lean can put feeling on film. The way he shows a whole landscape of the spirit. For me, that's the real geography of David Lean country. And that's why, in a David Lean movie, there's no such thing as an empty landscape.

[Kubrick] was unique in the sense that with each new film he redefined the medium and its possibilities. But he was more than just a technical innovator. Like all visionaries, he spoke the truth. And no matter how comfortable we think we are with the truth, it always comes as a profound shock when we're forced to meet it face-to-face.

A panoramic vision of Bob Dylan, his music, his shifting place in American culture, from multiple angles. In fact, reading Sean Wilentz's Bob Dylan in America is as thrilling and surprising as listening to a great Dylan song.

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.

Always get to the set or the location early, so that you can be all alone and draw your inspiration for the blocking and the setups in private and quiet.

Always get to the set or the location early, so that you can be all alone and draw your inspiration for the blocking and the setups in private and quiet. In one sense, it's about protecting yourself; in another sense, it's about always being open to surprise, even from the set, because there may be some detail that you hadn't noticed. I think this is crucial. There are many pictures that seem good in so many ways except one: They lack a sense of surprise, they've never left the page.

Always stay open to surprise.

An interviewer once asked me to discuss my collaboration with Elmer Bernstein, and precisely why I chose to work with him. My first thought was: How could I not work with Elmer, when I had the chance? Simply put, he's the best there is-the very best.

And so you try your best. Sometimes you go in with one thing, with one desire and come out with something else. In the case of The Aviator it was to create a Hollywood spectacle, but by about the second or third week of shooting you just want to literally survive it. Because don't forget, I also go through the editing process too, and when the film is released I have to talk about it. So, I take all of that very seriously.

As a kid I watched the Academy Awards on television and always wanted one - or several - like one of my favorite directions, John Ford. He won six. On the other hand, Orson Welles, who's on the top of my list, didn't win any. Alfred Hitchcock didn't win any. Howard Hawks didn't win any.

Basically, you make another movie, and another, and hopefully you feel good about every picture you make. And you say, 'My name is on that. I did that. It's OK.' But don't get me wrong, I still get excited by it all. That, I hope, will never disappear.

Because of the movies I make, people get nervous. They think of me as difficult and angry. I am difficult and angry, but they don't expect a sense of humor. And the only thing that gets me through is a sense of humor.

Being independent... is being innovative out of inspiration as well as necessity.

Eradicating a religion of kindness is, I think, a terrible thing for the Chinese to attempt.

Every scene is a lesson. Every shot is a school. Let the learning continue.

Food tells you everything about the way people live and who they are.

For me, the key image is the boat coming through the fog at the beginning. It's something I imagined and liked and I guess there are other references in other films I make - the similar type of image. But I think it's interesting, it's breaking through the mystery, or maybe it stays in the fog... we don't really know. Where is he at the beginning of the film, who is he?

I accept all awards. I like them.