Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm an artist. I've chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes.

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

Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.

In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past

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