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There are no ordinary lives.

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
Ordinary
Lives

More quotes by 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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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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History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.
Ken Burns
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People tend to forget that the word history contains the word story.
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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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
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A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
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 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 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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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 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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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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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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It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
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 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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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 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 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