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

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

Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.

World War II is smothered in sentimentality and nostalgia. What's interesting about Vietnam is that sentimentality is just not there, so you're given kind of a clean access to it in one way. It's also a war that represents a failure for the United States. Many people came back feeling like they never wanted to talk about it again. And so we developed a national amnesia.

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

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

Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.