Do something that will last and be beautiful. It doesn’t have to be a bridge-or a symphony or book or a business. It could be the look in the eye of a child you raise or a simple garden you tend. Do something that will last and be beautiful.
It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past.
By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
History isn’t really about the past – settling old scores. It’s about defining the present and who we are.
Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means, “God in us.”
People tend to forget that the word “history” contains the word “story”.
I don’t think that there has been a film that I’ve done that hasn’t been influenced by libraries and archives.
We all think that an exception is going to be made in our case and were going to live forever. Being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that thats not going to be. Story is there to remind us that its just OK.
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.
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 grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.
I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
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.
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.
We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.