A biography for Ken Burnshasn’t been written yet.
“By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.”
“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.”
“Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.”
“I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.”
“There is no communication in this world except between equals.”
“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.”
“A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.”
“History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.”
“History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.”
“The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.”
“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.”
“We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?”
“I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.”
“In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.”
“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.”