Top 120 Martin Scorsese Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I accept all awards. I like them.”

— Martin Scorsese

52. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

53. “I’m obsessed with New York. I just find it so remarkable. You really treasure this city when you go to different countries and you see that there is no mix. When you get back to the city, it’s such an exciting place.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

58. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

60. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

61. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

62. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

63. “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

64. “If I’m not complaining, I’m not having a good time, hah hah!”

— Martin Scorsese

65. “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.’”

— Martin Scorsese

66. “The only way I was able to defend myself was to be able to take punishment. Then I got a lot of respect. They said, “Oh, he’s okay, he can take it. Don’t hit him.” The guys were pretty big, and I had asthma.”

— Martin Scorsese

67. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

68. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

69. “Hong Kong cinema is something you can’t duplicate anyway.”

— Martin Scorsese

70. “I’m not a Hollywood director. I’m an in spite of Hollywood director.”

— Martin Scorsese

71. “I’ve been thrown out of schools and fired from jobs. I don’t want to work. I can honestly say I haven’t done an honest day’s work in my life.”

— Martin Scorsese

72. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

73. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

75. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

76. “Vic Armstrong is, of course, a legend.”

— Martin Scorsese

77. “There’s a way that the force of disappointment can be alchemized into something that will paradoxically renew you.”

— Martin Scorsese

78. “If everything moves along and there are no major catastrophes we’re basically headed towards holograms.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

81. “It’s interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.”

— Martin Scorsese

82. “Film in the 20th century, it’s the American art form, like jazz.”

— Martin Scorsese

83. “I grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American – more Sicilian, actually.”

— Martin Scorsese

84. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

86. “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

87. “I also saw the Dalai Lama a few times.”

— Martin Scorsese

88. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

89. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

90. “As a child I had terrible asthma.”

— Martin Scorsese

91. “The tone of the picture and the atmosphere was in my head and in my blood in a way once I’d decided to make the picture. I had to find my way through that to choose, select, emphasise certain visual elements and sound.”

— Martin Scorsese

92. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

93. “I don’t like being in houses alone.”

— Martin Scorsese

94. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

95. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese

96. “I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.”

— Martin Scorsese

97. “In truly great films – the ones that people need to make, the ones that start speaking through them, the ones that keep moving into territory that is more and more unfathomable and uncomfortable – nothing’s ever simple or neatly resolved. You’re left with a mystery.”

— Martin Scorsese

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

— Martin Scorsese

99. “I’ve been to North Africa many times.”

— Martin Scorsese

100. “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.”

— Martin Scorsese