Ken Burns Quotes

• 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

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

  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 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

• 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

• 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

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

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  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 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

• 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

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

  Ken Burns

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

  Ken Burns

• A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

  Ken Burns

• We want them to stop the current arrangement, share it with the public and hold hearings.

  Ken Burns

  Tags in Arrangement

Ken Burns (44)

Birth:	29th July, 1953
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Director, Producer

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Today's Anniversary - 23rd December

Births

• 1950 - Michael C. Burgess
• 1935 - Paul Hornung
• 1812 - Samuel Smiles
• 1908 - Yousuf Karsh
• 1984 - Cary Williams

Deaths

• 1959 - Lord Halifax
• 1834 - Thomas Robert Malthus
• 2000 - Victor Borge
• 2007 - Oscar Emmanuel Peterson
• 1972 - Abraham Joshua Heschel