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

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

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.

I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.

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

You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.

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