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 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.

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

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past

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.

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

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

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 an active disengagement.

History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.

I think we continually need to understand how important an event the war was - how defining, how central to who we are. Everything that came before it led up to it, and everything of importance to this country - at least up to 1940 - was a consequence of it. Even now there's an echo of the war, however faint, in almost everyone's life.

The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.

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.

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.