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.

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

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

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

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.

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.

The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.