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History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.

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
Past
Really
Scores
Defining
Settling
Score
Present
History

More quotes by 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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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
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I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
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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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'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 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
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By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
Ken Burns
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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.
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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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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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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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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History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.
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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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 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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People tend to forget that the word history contains the word story.
Ken Burns
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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
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You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
Ken Burns