Ken Burns Quotes
-
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.
→ -
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
→ -
We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.
→ -
We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
→ -
Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.
→ -
Do something that will last and be beautiful. It doesn't have to be a bridge-or a symphony or book or a business. It could be the look in the eye of a child you raise or a simple garden you tend. Do something that will last and be beautiful.
→ -
We all think that an exception is going to be made in our case and were going to live forever. Being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that thats not going to be. Story is there to remind us that its just OK.
→ -
I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.
→ -
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.
→ -
To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.
→ -
History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
→ -
I'm a filmmaker. I'm an artist. I've chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes.
→ -
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.
→ -
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
→ -
I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives.
→ -
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 its extremely predictable, its a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and theres a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.
→ -
A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
→ -
You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
→ -
When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.
→ -
I think we continually need to understand how important an event the war was - how defining, how central to who we are. Everything that came before it led up to it, and everything of importance to this country - at least up to 1940 - was a consequence of it. Even now there's an echo of the war, however faint, in almost everyone's life.
→ -
It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.
→ -
Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.
→ -
Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means, "God in us."
→ -
I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
→ -
I wake the dead. I bring Jackie Robinson and the Roosevelts to life. Who do you think Im trying to wake up?
→ -
You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.
→ -
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.
→ -
Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.
→ -
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 an active disengagement.
→
Related Authors
-
Hank Azaria Film actor -
Shelby Foote Historian -
Mark Twain Author -
John Muir Author -
Stephen Ambrose Historian -
Franklin D. Roosevelt 32nd U.S. President -
Eleanor Roosevelt Former First Lady of the United States -
Jackie Robinson Baseball player -
Theodore Roosevelt 26th U.S. President -
David McCullough Author -
Jack Johnson Singer-songwriter -
Siddhartha Mukherjee Physician -
Peter Coyote Actor -
Keith David Film actor -
Doris Kearns Goodwin Historian -
Elizabeth Cady Stanton Activist -
Sullivan Ballou Lawyer -
Geoffrey Ward Author -
Abraham Lincoln 16th U.S. President -
Wynton Marsalis Trumpeter