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" 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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" 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. "

" By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz. "

" History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The flame is not out, but it is flickering. "

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