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"When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things."
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"I read some, and then visited with people involved in this curious, exciting and somewhat misunderstood sub-culture. I met with a fang maker, who offered to fit me for an exquisite pair."

"Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second."

"People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid."

"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

"Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances."

"Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self."

"If you have carefully examined hundred people you met in your life journey, it means that you have read hundred different books! Every person you know is a book; world is full of walking books; some are boring, some are marvellous, some are weak, some are powerful, but they are all useful because they all carry different experiences of different paths!"
Explore more quotes by Ken Burns

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."
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