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

Ken Burns

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Ken Burns
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: July 29
Actor
Cinematographer
Film Director
Film Producer
Manufacturer
Producer
Screenwriter
Brooklyn
New York
Kenneth Lauren Burns
Kenneth L. Burns
Kenneth Burns
Without
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Defining
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More quotes by Ken Burns

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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.
Ken Burns
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A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
Ken Burns
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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
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Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.
Ken Burns
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Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
Ken Burns
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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
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I wake the dead. I bring Jackie Robinson and the Roosevelts to life. Who do you think Im trying to wake up?
Ken Burns
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Ken Burns
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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
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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
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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.
Ken Burns
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The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.
Ken Burns
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I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives.
Ken Burns
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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?
Ken Burns
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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
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I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.
Ken Burns
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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.
Ken Burns