Martin Scorsese Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

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

It is not the most brilliant that excel in film, but the most patient!

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

You have to remain strong. That's the kind of filmmaker I want to encourage. Orson Welles was the one who said, you know, you can learn anything you need to know about filmmaking- that's camera, sound, celluloid, video at this point- in four hours. It has nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with it... It has to do with what you want to say. If you feel you have something to say, you'll find that way to get it said, on film, and not let anyone or anything chip away at that or tarnish it, because it's something special and precious.

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.

I wouldn't presume to be God's point of view.

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.

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

I have a desire to tell stories. And I'm never quite satisfied.

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

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.

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.

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.

Violence is not the answer, it doesn’t work any more. We are at the end of the worst century in which the greatest atrocities in the history of the world have occurred... The nature of human beings must change. We must cultivate love and compassion.

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

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

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

When everything is added up, the frequent blows weighted against the sporadic triumphs, this is I have to say not just a vocation, it's a great gift. But you also know this, for your work, for your passion, every day is a rededication. Painters, dancers, actors, writers, filmmakers. It's the same for all of you, all of us. Every step is a first step. Every brush stroke is a test. Every scene is a lesson. Every shot is a school. So, let the learning continue.