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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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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
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More quotes by 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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It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
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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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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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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You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
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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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
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
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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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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There are no ordinary lives.
Ken Burns
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People tend to forget that the word history contains the word story.
Ken Burns