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"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."
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"The difference between a 'man' and a 'father' is that the former shares his genes, but latter gives his life."
Explore more quotes by Ken Burns
"You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time."
"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."
"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."
"I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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