We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

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?

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.

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

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 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 subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.