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

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

Ken Burns

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

Ken Burns

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Ken Burns

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement.

Ken Burns

I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

Ken Burns

You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood.

Ken Burns

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

Ken Burns

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

Ken Burns

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

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

Ken Burns

I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.

Ken Burns

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

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

I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.

Ken Burns

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

Ken Burns

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

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

I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.

Ken Burns

You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.

Ken Burns

The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.

Ken Burns

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

Author Bio

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