The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.

You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.

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.

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?

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.

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