Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Scorsese

Scorsese is doing what he does best: refusing the clean moral ledger. The line starts with a public-facing disclaimer - “I don’t agree with everything he did” - not because he’s suddenly coy, but because he knows the modern reflex is to audit a life before you’re allowed to look at it. Then he pivots: “but we’re dealing with this Howard Hughes, at this point.” That “this” is doing heavy lifting. It marks a narrative choice, a specific Hughes shaped by the demands of cinema and by the phase of life Scorsese wants to interrogate: the mythic mogul turning into a man trapped inside his own legend.

The quote’s real engine is its slide from biography into tragedy. “Ultimately the flaw… the curse so to speak” reframes Hughes less as a case study in excess than as a character in a classical sense: a towering figure whose gifts and pathologies are inseparable. Scorsese’s intent isn’t exoneration; it’s linkage. The same obsessive drive that builds airplanes and bankrolls Hollywood also spirals into control, isolation, and ritual. Calling it a “curse” suggests inevitability without removing responsibility - a filmmaker’s way of acknowledging how systems (money, fame, American ambition) can turn temperament into destiny.

Contextually, it fits Scorsese’s larger project: portraits of men seduced by power and undone by appetite. He’s not asking us to like Hughes. He’s asking us to watch the machinery of greatness grind a person down, and to notice how the culture that crowns him also helps lock the door from the outside.