Happy Birthday Martin Scorsese!

Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people.

Es sieht mühelos aus, aber es ist sehr kompliziert, einfach zu sein. Es ist wie Clint Eastwoods Persona, die sehr cool und ruhig ist, aber unter der Oberfläche tut sich viel - dort ist sehr viel Leidenschaft verborgen und eine ganze Menge Verständnis für das menschliche Wesen.

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.

Früher gab es öffentliche Hinrichtungen, heute gibt es das Fernsehen.

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

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

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'm sad to see celluloid go, there's no doubt. But, you know, nitrate went, by the way, in 1971. If you ever saw a nitrate print of a silent film and then saw an acetate print, you'd see a big difference, but nobody remembers anymore. The acetate print is what we have. Maybe. Now it's digital.

Can a film really change anything? I mean, what was the last time? Maybe the Italian neo-realists, where they became the voice and the heart and the soul of Italy, a nation that had been destroyed. I don't know.

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

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.

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.

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

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.

As you grow older, you change.

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.

I happen to like vampires more than zombies.

One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.

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

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

I didn't realize there are generations who do not know about the origins of film.

I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me.

A lot of what I'm obsessed with is the relationship and the dynamics between people and the family, particularly brothers and their father.

You don't make pictures for Oscars.

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

People want to classify and say, 'OK, this is a gangster film.' 'This is a Western.' 'This is a... ' You know? It's easy to classify and it makes people feel comfortable, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter.

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

I'm re-energized by being around people who mean a lot to me.

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.

If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?

All my life, I never really felt comfortable anywhere in New York, except maybe in an apartment somewhere.

What the Dalai Lama had to resolve was whether to stay in Tibet or leave. He wanted to stay, but staying would have meant the total destruction of Tibet, because he would have died and that would have ripped the heart out of his people.

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.

It's interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.

As a child I had terrible asthma.

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

It's hard to let new stuff in. And whether that admits a weakness, I don't know.

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

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

There was always a part of me that wanted to be an old-time director. But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro.

You never know how much time you have left.

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

I grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American - more Sicilian, actually.

I mean, music totally comes from your soul.

I still dislike phones, yeah!

I'm going to be 60, and I'm almost used to myself.

Some of my films are known for the depiction of violence. I don't have anything to prove with that any more.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.

Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god... I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.

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

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.

Zombies, what are you going to do with them? Just keep chopping them up, shooting at them, shooting at them.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We can't keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don't know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?

Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It's the nature of the process.

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.

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