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"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."
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"Miranda raised her eyebrows. Apparently she hadn't figured me for a country music fan. I liked her for that."

"Music is the only language which can be understood by everyone-even a tree can understand music."

"Music reveals the deepest beauty of the soul."
Explore more quotes by Ken Burns

"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."

"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 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 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."

"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 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."

"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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