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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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Ken Burns
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: July 29
Actor
Cinematographer
Film Director
Film Producer
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Producer
Screenwriter
Brooklyn
New York
Kenneth Lauren Burns
Kenneth L. Burns
Kenneth Burns
Jazz
Genius
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Music
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Improvisation
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Arts
More quotes by Ken Burns
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
History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
Ken Burns
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
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
I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.
Ken Burns
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
It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
Ken Burns
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
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.
Ken Burns
By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
Ken Burns
I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
Ken Burns
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.
Ken Burns
There are no ordinary lives.
Ken Burns
You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
Ken Burns
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.
Ken Burns
History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.
Ken Burns
I wake the dead. I bring Jackie Robinson and the Roosevelts to life. Who do you think Im trying to wake up?
Ken Burns
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
I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes) that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious and malleable thing.
Ken Burns
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
