96 Quotes by Ken Burns

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 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’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.

Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time’s constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.

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 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.

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 don’t think that there has been a film that I’ve done that hasn’t been influenced by libraries and archives.

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.