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

Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means, "God in us."

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

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.

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.

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