I think there's only one or two films where I've had all the financial support I needed. All the rest, I wish I'd had the money to shoot another ten days.

I also saw the Dalai Lama a few times.

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.

I'm very phobic about flying, but I'm also drawn to it.

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've seen many, many movies over the years, and there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to continue to make films.

I love the look of planes and the idea of how a plane flies. The more I learn about it the better I feel; while I still may not like it, I have a sense of what is really happening.

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.

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.

There are times when you have to face your enemies, sit down and deal with it.

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 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.

Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people.

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.

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

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.

I've always liked 3D.

I can't really envision a time when I'm not shooting something.

I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.

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.

As you grow older, you change.

The best I can do is to make a film every two years.

I know there were many good policemen who died doing their duty. Some of the cops were even friends of ours. But a cop can go both ways.

As a child I had terrible asthma.

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.

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

The bottom line is, I tend to be going back to older and older music.

On every film you suffer, but on some you really suffer.

I mean I have a project that I have been wanting to make for quite a while now; and basically, it's a story of my parents growing up in the Lower East Side.

I still dislike phones, yeah!

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.

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.

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.

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?

I don't like being in houses alone.

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.

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.

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

I don't agree with everything he did in his life, but we're dealing with this Howard Hughes, at this point. And also ultimately the flaw in Howard Hughes, the curse so to speak.

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.

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

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

I wish I could do everything in 3D.

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

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.

I'm an older generation.

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

You've got to understand when a collaborator isn't satisfied anymore.

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

I don't really see many people... don't really go anywhere either.