Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Scorsese

Terror and appetite in the same breath: that’s the Scorsese engine. “I’m very phobic about flying, but I’m also drawn to it” reads like a personal quirk, yet it doubles as a compact manifesto for his entire filmography, where danger isn’t a detour from desire; it’s the fuel. The line works because it refuses the tidy self-help arc of “overcoming fear.” Instead, it admits something messier and more honest: anxiety can be magnetic.

Coming from Scorsese, a director obsessed with velocity, vertigo, and moral free fall, flying is more than travel. It’s a symbol of leaving the ground - the controlled, the known - for an environment where a small miscalculation feels cosmic. That maps neatly onto his recurring characters: men who crave transcendence (power, grace, purity, fame) while knowing the cost will likely be catastrophic. The push-pull isn’t hypocrisy; it’s compulsion.

Context matters too. Scorsese is famously meticulous, a craftsman who storyboards chaos so it lands with surgical clarity. A fear of flying suggests a body that doesn’t enjoy surrendering control, while being “drawn” to it hints at the artist’s need to approach what unnerves him. You can hear the same tension in his kinetic camera moves: the glide of a tracking shot that feels euphoric, then suddenly predatory.

The subtext is confession by metaphor: he’s not chasing comfort. He’s chasing the feeling right before the stomach drops.