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.
Ken Burns

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?
Ken Burns

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.
Ken Burns

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

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.
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.
Ken Burns

The flame is not out, but it is flickering.
Ken Burns

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

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.
Ken Burns

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

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.
Ken Burns

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
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.
Ken Burns

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.
Ken Burns

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.
Ken Burns

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.
Ken Burns

You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
Ken Burns

You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood.
Ken Burns

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