Martin Scorsese

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“You don't make pictures for Oscars.”

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

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

“I think when you're young and have that first burst of energy and make five or six pictures in a row that tell the stories of all the things in life you want to say... well, maybe those are the films that should have won me the Oscar.”

“I've been to North Africa many times.”

“The young people today are the 21st century.”

“I make different films now.”

“I wish I could do everything in 3D.”

“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.”