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

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

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

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

The reason why you do history, and particularly why you do war, is that you want to make sure that in the next war, some lessons were learned. There's a saying: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Or Ecclesiastes: "What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again." Human nature always superimposes itself - its strength and its frailty over the rush of chaos of ongoing events - and we can perceive patterns and themes and motifs.

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.

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