Top 120 Martin Scorsese Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Music and film are inseparable. They always have been and always will be.”

— Martin Scorsese

2. “There’s no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.”

— Martin Scorsese

3. “Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.”

— Martin Scorsese

4. “Your job is to get your audience to care about your obsessions.”

— Martin Scorsese

5. “The most important thing is the script.”

— Martin Scorsese

6. “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

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

— Martin Scorsese

8. “More than ninety percent of directing a picture is the right casting.”

— Martin Scorsese

9. “My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.”

— Martin Scorsese

10. “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

11. “When I’m making a film, I’m the audience.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

13. “Could you double-check the envelope?”

— Martin Scorsese

14. “You’ve got to love something enough to kill it.”

— Martin Scorsese

15. “Always stay open to surprise.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

17. “It is not the most brilliant that excel in film, but the most patient!”

— Martin Scorsese

18. “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

19. “You’ve got to protect whatever creative talent you have left.”

— Martin Scorsese

20. “Sometimes God picks you up and tells you, “You’ve been messing around now. You’re going to have to stop this, stop that, but I’ll give you another chance.” And you wonder why you’re given another chance. It must be for something; it must be to celebrate life.”

— Martin Scorsese

21. “I’ve seen many, many movies over the years, and there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to continue to make films.”

— Martin Scorsese

22. “You don’t make pictures for Oscars.”

— Martin Scorsese

23. “I’m not videotaping my life, but in a way I am trying to put certain things about myself on canvas.”

— Martin Scorsese

24. “Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.”

— Martin Scorsese

25. “Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high?”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

27. “I’m not interested in a realistic look, not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel.”

— Martin Scorsese

28. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

29. “I love movies – it’s my whole life, and that’s it.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

31. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

32. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

34. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

36. “We cannot burn Mick Jagger. We want the effect, but we can’t burn him.”

— Martin Scorsese

37. “If you don’t like the films of Samuel Fuller, then you just don’t like cinema.”

— Martin Scorsese

38. “If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?”

— Martin Scorsese

39. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

42. “As you grow older, you change.”

— Martin Scorsese

43. “I have a desire to tell stories. And I’m never quite satisfied.”

— Martin Scorsese

44. “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

45. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

46. “I loved the idea of seeing the world through a boy’s eyes.”

— Martin Scorsese

47. “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?”

— Martin Scorsese

48. “I don’t know how else to tell the story except to utilise that vocabulary: the rain, the darkness, the mansions, the framing, etc, the lighting and that sort of thing.”

— Martin Scorsese

49. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

50. “I’m going to be 60, and I’m almost used to myself.”

— Martin Scorsese