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

I think we continually need to understand how important an event the war was - how defining, how central to who we are. Everything that came before it led up to it, and everything of importance to this country - at least up to 1940 - was a consequence of it. Even now there's an echo of the war, however faint, in almost everyone's life.

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.

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.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

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.

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.