Ken Burns
FameRank: 6

"Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns" is an American director and producer of documentary films, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs. His most widely known documentaries are The Civil War (TV series)/The Civil War (1990), Baseball (TV series)/Baseball (1994), Jazz (TV series)/Jazz (2001), The War (2007 film)/The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (miniseries)/Prohibition (2011), The Central Park Five (2012), and The Roosevelts (film)/The Roosevelts (2014).

Burns' documentaries have been nominated for two Academy Awards and have won Emmy Awards, among other honors.

If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous directors! More Ken Burns on Wikipedia.

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?

[Sometimes, for example, we assume the people hearing us don't know anything. I've read a commentator saying that the new] Jazz ... OK, we got that part, move on.

OK, I'm going with Altman.

This is what I don't understand, why we're not taught this. I mean, you would be hard pressed to say that there was no machine more important than the car in the last 100 years. Nothing has been more influential in how we live, how we work, what's worked itself into our songs, into our mythology. The idea of a road trip is very much in everyone's life, and this is the first road trip.

Impossible to imagine what we would have been like without it.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

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.

Oh, I'm just sitting here dying about it.