Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are no ordinary lives.
A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
The flame is not out, but it is flickering.
History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.
There is no communication in this world except between equals.
By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".
It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.
You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means, "God in us."
I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.
I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.
I wake the dead. I bring Jackie Robinson and the Roosevelts to life. Who do you think Im trying to wake up?
The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.
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?
I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.
I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives.
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.
I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.
I'm a filmmaker. I'm an artist. I've chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes.
History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.
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 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 began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.
I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.
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.