Quotes by Ken Burns

About Ken Burns:

Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns is an American filmmaker, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs in documentary films. His most widely known documentaries are The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Central Park Five (2012), and The Roosevelts (2014).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

Ken Burns

Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.

Ken Burns

The flame is not out, but it is flickering.

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

I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.

Ken Burns

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

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

One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes.

Ken Burns

I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.

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

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

Ken Burns

When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.

Ken Burns

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

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

There is no communication in this world except between equals.

Ken Burns

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.

Ken Burns

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

Ken Burns

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

History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.

Ken Burns

Author Bio

  • NameKen Burns
  • DescriptionAmerican documentary filmmaker
  • BornJuly 29, 1953
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionFilm Director
  • AwardsLincoln Prize; National Humanities Medal; Emmy Award