KEN BURNS

You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.

You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood.

The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.

I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement.

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

The flame is not out, but it is flickering.

I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.

I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.

I never, ever want to apologize for a film. If it's bad I'll say it's my fault. And that's what I can say so far in all the films that I've done, that if you don't like it, it's entirely my fault.

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.

I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.

One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes.

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.

History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.

The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.