You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

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

I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes) that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious and malleable thing.

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.

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

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?

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.