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

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

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

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 Quote

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

I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
- Ken Burns Quote

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.
- Ken Burns Quote

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.
- Ken Burns Quote

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.
- Ken Burns 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 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 Quote

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.
- Ken Burns 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 Quote

In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.
- Ken Burns Quote

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
- Ken Burns 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 Quote

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.
- Ken Burns Quote

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.
- Ken Burns Quote

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.
- Ken Burns Quote

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
- Ken Burns Quote

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.
- Ken Burns Quote

Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don't believe that Miles sold out but I'm not in a position to say.
- Ken Burns Quote

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

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.
- Ken Burns Quote