John Fusco Quotes

At a young age, when I was fascinated with China, I read 'The Travels of Marco Polo' and learned about this exciting, dramatic world he captured and reported on. He's so little known, but yet this mythology has survived that's so misrepresentative of his story.

It all goes back to 'Wow, I never knew this about Marco Polo.' This is an incredible story and an incredible character, and such a rich world of Mongolian and Chinese culture.

Marco Polo has been kind of buried under this cloud of rather banal historical dust, when the true story is so much more exciting.

I grew up with a fascination with Marco Polo. I had this unlikely interest in the East as a young man, and you can't really read about Chinese history and philosophy without encountering him at every turn.

It always circled back around to Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. That always fascinated me because so few people make the connection between the two.

I feel like we are reintroducing historical figures, with the explorer Marco Polo and the grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, the ruler of the Mongol empire, the trading place that everybody wanted to get involved in.

I feel that Marco Polo has really been misrepresented - has never really gotten his due.

Everybody has done something about Marco Polo. It's the tiredest, most trite and worked-over subject in the world, and that was why it appealed to me, because I wanted to do something really new and different about something that had been worked over all these centuries, and I think I did.

There are two types of stories: public and private.

One of the things I find exciting about Joan of Arc is how clearly the story of her life reveals the creation of myth, a process in which every one of us is involved - every one of us who tells stories and all those who listen, each informing the other.

Khan let Polo be his eyes and ears. He was the first one to build a bridge between East and West.

I have always had eclectic obsessions: astrophysics, music theory, the Mongol empire and its history, and the history of the Silk Road, to name a few.

The more I learned about Shoeless Joe, the more I felt he was maligned.

I got a real kick when a series was set in the court of Kublai Khan or in Nero's Rome.

Don Juan's story can have no end, and that, on my word, is the definitive and true story of 'Don Juan.'

Did you know that Mozart had no arms and no legs? I've seen statues of him on people's pianos.

Christopher Columbus, who said to Queen Isabella, No, you got it wrong! The world is round. You're flat! Never got a dinner!

Even when the facts are available, most people seem to prefer the legend, and refuse to believe the truth when it in any way dislodges the myth.

I read every biography [of Jackie Kennedy] I could get my hands on.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.

It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to... immigrate, you could say.

Abraham Lincoln was interested in, in saving the Union. Well, most negroes have been tricked into thinking that Lincoln was a negro lover whose primary aim was to free them, and he died because he freed them.

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

I wanted to make a kids' film that would strengthen contemporary mythology.

One of our nation's greatest leaders of all time was Hubert Horatio Hornblower.