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

When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.

Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.

No one was more important to the game of baseball in the last half of the 20th century than Henry Aaron and no one writes about that supremely talented man, that tumultuous time and this treasure of a game better than Howard Bryant. Together, they are an extraordinary combination, and the book Bryant has written gets to the heart of the complicated and dignified, patient and consistent genuine hero that is Henry Aaron.

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

You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.

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