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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Never
Apology
Like
Fault
Entirely
Faults
Films
Film
Ever
Apologize
Done
Apologizing

More quotes by Ken Burns

Image
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
Image
By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
Ken Burns
Image
You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
Ken Burns
Image
History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
Ken Burns
Image
I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
Ken Burns
Image
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
Image
There are no ordinary lives.
Ken Burns
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.
Ken Burns
Image
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
Ken Burns
Image
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
Image
People tend to forget that the word history contains the word story.
Ken Burns
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I wake the dead. I bring Jackie Robinson and the Roosevelts to life. Who do you think Im trying to wake up?
Ken Burns
Image
A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
Ken Burns
Image
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
Image
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