Top 15 Martin Scorsese Quotes

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

Your job is to get your audience to care about your obsessions.

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 life time, we need to keep them alive.

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.

"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

The most interesting of the classic movie genres to me are the indigenous ones: the Western, which was born on the Frontier, the Gangster Film, which originated in the East Coast cities, and the Musical, which was spawned by Broadway. They remind me of jazz: they allowed for endless, increasingly complex, sometimes perverse variations. When these variations were played by the masters, they reflected the changing times; they gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche.

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.

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.

I would have practically done all my films in 3D. There is something that 3D gives to the picture that takes you into another land and you stay there and it’s a good place to be. (…) It’s like seeing a moving sculpture of the actor and it’s almost like a combination of theater and film combined and it immerses you in the story more. I saw audiences care about the people more. The minute it started people wanted three things: color, sound and depth. You want to recreate life.

Because of the movies I make, people get nervous, because 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.

If you’re looking for the origins of film culture in America, look no further than Amos Vogel.

My father took me to see this film in 1950, when I was eight years old. And I’ve never forgotten it. I wouldn’t know how to begin to explain what this film has meant to me over the years. It’s about the joy and exuberance of film-making itself. It’s one of the true miracles of film history. What keeps nourishing me over the years is the spell the film casts, how it weaves the mystery of the obsession of creativity, of the creative drive. It all comes down to that wonderful exchange early in the film when Anton Walbrook confronts Moira Shearer at a cocktail party. ‘Why do you want to dance?’ he asks, and she answers, ‘Why do you want to live?’ The look on his face is extraordinary.’ Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that exchange. It expresses so much about the burning need for art – the mystery of the passion to create. It’s not that you want to do it, it’s that you have to do it. You have no choice. You have to live it and it comes with a price. But what a time paying it.

[on, The Red Shoes (1948)]

There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.

No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

There's a way that the force of disappointment can be alchemized into something that will paradoxically renew you.