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"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."
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"Attempting to write vocal oriented songs to me felt like going through the motions and if you are going to go through the motions you might as well just do any gig that caused you to do repetitive motions like banging a hammer or serving fries."

"Well, I don't think it ever did, but in the early '60s I got interested in folk music."

"I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano."
Explore more quotes by 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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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