Ken Burns

Quotations

  • “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 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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  • “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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  • “History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.” -Ken Burns

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  • “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

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  • “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

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