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. Ken Burns Read Quote
You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living. Ken Burns Read Quote
I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can’t work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can’t really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance. Ken Burns Read Quote
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. Ken Burns Read Quote
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. Ken Burns Read Quote
You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time. Ken Burns Read Quote
I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style. Ken Burns Read Quote
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. Ken Burns Read Quote
I subscribe to William Faulkner’s’ view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now. Ken Burns Read Quote
