"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"

In this quote, Martin Scorsese reviews his training in the Lower East Side, a neighborhood in New York City known for its cultural diversity and historic challenges. Scorsese, revered for his keen insights into human behavior and society through film, sheds light on his personal struggles during his developmental years.

Scorsese indicates that his youth environment was swarming with violence, which postured a significant challenge to his establishing moral compass. Making use of the expression "I definitely wasn't able to get it" recommends a sense of inaccessibility or unattainability of specific perfects or goals. This likely describes the problem of sticking to or perhaps conceptualizing a non-violent lifestyle in an environment where violence appeared pervasive.

The phrase "balance what I really believed was the right way to live" points to an internal dispute. Scorsese felt a strong conviction about the "ideal way to live", which presumably included principles of peace, stability, and possibly creative expression. Yet, these suitables were continuously at odds with the extreme truths he experienced regularly. Scorsese's acknowledgment of this imbalance underscores his early awareness of the intricacies of human morality, a recurrent theme in his work.

Furthermore, the mention of violence "among the people I understood" highlights a personal connection to the chaos. It wasn't an abstract idea but a lived reality, linked with his social relationships. This individual exposure likely added to Scorsese's nuanced representation of flawed, complex characters in his films, reflecting both his empathetic understanding of human frailty and an implicit critique of societal conditions that promote such violence.

In summary, Scorsese's quote captures an extensive minute of self-questioning from his youth, where he grapples with aligning his intrinsic beliefs against a backdrop of societal violence, a struggle that deeply informed his worldview and creative endeavors.