Ira Glass quotes:

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  • The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

  • Radio is more powerful the closer we mimic the way we actually speak to each other. That's why Howard Stern is such a great radio talent. People on his show are actually speaking to each other. You might not like what they're saying, but they're real conversations.

  • Harry Potter to me is a bore. His talent arrives as a gift; he's chosen. Who can identify with that? But Hermione - she's working harder than anyone, she's half outsider, right? Half Muggle. She shouldn't be there at all. It's so unfair that Harry's the star of the books, given how hard she worked to get her powers.

  • Traditional broadcast media seems old-fashioned and vague to me. When I watch television news, I'm aware of what skilled journalists they are, but I find it hard because of the corny way they present it.

  • We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.

  • It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.

  • Smallville' is like a Domino's pizza. While you're eating, you're thinking, 'This is good, and it reminds me of pizza, but there's not enough flavor in each bite.' That's the feeling you have the entire time with 'Smallville' - that it's just about to be good, but it never is.

  • I'll meet listeners who tell me what a great voice I have. But I don't have a great voice for radio. My voice is the utterly normal voice, but sheer repetition has made them think it's OK. Mick Jagger once was asked, 'What makes a hit song? He said, 'Repetition.'

  • But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.

  • I love traveling. But I haven't had big, transformative experiences while on the road. When I go out on the road, it's to go out and get a story or do a promotional event.

  • The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.

  • When you're learning, especially to write, unless you're some incredibly gifted writer, a young Malcom Gladwell, say, you need to be imitating people. You need to be imitating how they make their work, how they structure it, how they design the pieces. It gives you chops; it gives you moves.

  • I never realized before this the emotional power of some really simple, corny tropes: people with top hats, people with batons, confetti going off, how important it is to smile.

  • I am such a do-goody, people-pleasing kid - or I was - I don't think I've ever been fired, not even from an ice cream shop, magician for kids' parties, not even in my early jobs in radio.

  • I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'

  • When I say something untrue on the air, I mean for it to be transparently untrue. I assume people know when I'm just saying something for effect. Or to be funny.

  • I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.

  • I was a temp secretary for a long time, and I went at it with a passion, and I tried to do a nice job in all my jobs.

  • In radio, you have two tools. Sound and silence.

  • When I was a bad writer, I would consciously imitate other NPR writers who I thought were wonderful. I suppose that everyone's artistic practice is different. But I collaborate and sometimes don't agree at all with my collaborators' opinions. It forces you to understand why you don't agree with something: what's the fight you're picking.

  • I don't take care of my voice at all, which is one reason that I sound as bad as I do.

  • I feel like dance, by its nature, goes so easily to grand and beautiful.

  • Honestly, I find the analysis of dreams is one of the dullest things. I say this as a therapist kid. I find them deeply uninteresting, as a window to the soul.

  • When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

  • The TiVo is really an amazing machine. Like everyone who has one, I totally recommend it. Just as everyone who's married will tell you to get married, and everyone who has a baby tells you to have a baby, everyone who owns a TiVo will tell you to get a TiVo, and they'll say things like 'Your life will be completely different.' It's true.

  • When you're working in public radio, you don't have any money to advertise.

  • I'm just not very funny.

  • People are generally forced to change. We don't want to change, and then something absolutely forces us to realize that what we are doing isn't working or that our picture of the world is wrong. We fail. So we change.

  • I think one of the reasons that I got so good at it, as somebody making radio stories, is that on the radio I can actually - I can understand what's happening in the interview and can make a connection in a way that makes sense.

  • The pledge drive has everything going against it as broadcasting. It's repetitive. It's ad-libbed by people who can't ad-lib. It's about asking for money, which is something nobody wants to hear, even from their own relatives.

  • I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.

  • I don't tweet because I don't need another creative venue. I don't need another form for self-expression. I don't need another way to get my thoughts out to people. I have one. I'm good.

  • In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.

  • I don't know how to read. I get all my news from Jon Stewart every day.

  • I feel like in an interview situation, it's a kind of intimacy that I can understand and handle - versus in real life, when I'm much more of a bumbler and have a hard time.

  • Grease and starch just always win over protein. In food as in so many things. Look around you, that's what our whole country is based on. It's amazing that Michael Jordan can be an iconic figure because he's basically just protein.

  • I don't go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong.

  • In general in New York, we all eat like kings. Insane quality, mind-blowing variety, at all price ranges.

  • Any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn't sound like some news robot but in fact sounds like a real person having the reactions a real person would.

  • One reason I do the live shows - and the monthly speeches at public radio stations - is to remind myself that people hear the show, that it has an audience, that it exists in the world. It's so easy to forget that.

  • Reporters tend to find in others what they are suited to find, so there is a whole school of reporting where they are cynical about the world, and everything reinforces that. Whereas I tend to be optimistic and be amused by people and like them, even rather bad people.

  • Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?

  • I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.

  • It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will...

  • But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.

  • It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

  • I don't meet many people who are talking about shows on Showtime.

  • I dont meet many people who are talking about shows on Showtime.

  • You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.

  • I started out doing production work on promos, stuff like that. I didn't think it was cool to be working for NPR. I didn't need anything to be cool. I just wanted something to do that would be interesting. It was fun. I didn't think of it as anything else but fun.

  • I'm a big Penn & Teller fan. But I myself was never very good; I was a teenage magician who performed at kids' parties. I can still perform a vanish, credibly, and I still, in special circumstances, will make a balloon animal.

  • It's tricky, performing the show live. Because when you're in a big auditorium, in front of 700 people, the natural tendency is to want to talk louder. You want to project.

  • I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually.

  • One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.

  • I'm not a natural storyteller at all. If anything, I'm a natural interviewer, a natural listener, but I'm not a natural storyteller.

  • I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.

  • Starting in the 1970s, American cars started to lose market share to foreign cars. It was clear what was happening - these better-made foreign car companies were encroaching on the U.S., and the U.S. car makers had less than half of their own country's market.

  • It took, for me, a long time to develop this idea of what to do on the radio. But from the beginning of my time in radio, I had pretty non-traditional tasks.

  • I liked the people at Brown, while I really disliked most of the fellow students I had met at Northwestern.

  • The Flash could do everything twice as fast. Except you never saw him think twice as fast or speak twice as fast. Could he do math faster than the other superheroes? Could he compute the tip for the bill twice as fast?

  • I only got interested in radio once I talked my way into an internship at NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C. in 1978, never having heard the network on the air.

  • I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.

  • I'm trying to make perfect moments. And those generate meaning. If you go deep enough in how to make a moment, very quickly you come to how narrative works - to what we are as a species, how we've come up with telling stories in scenes and images.

  • At some point, all comics have to go out and be retail salesmen doing door-to-door. And this idea of somebody who totally knows their craft having to get up for free in front of a crowd to work out some stuff they're thinking in their head, still, after as much success as you can get, is really interesting.

  • Like, radio is closer to a Tumblr, or a blog, or Twitter, than it is to television, I think.

  • I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

  • I was a freelancer all through my 20s and was very slow to get good at what I did.

  • Honestly, I am so ignorant of how dance works that I can't even imagine a story that you would want to tell through movement.

  • I don't own a radio. I listen to everything through apps or on my iPhone. And then I download the shows I like. Shows like 'Fresh Air', 'Radiolab', 'Snap Judgement', all those shows.

  • I think people who live in New York don't realize just how much time they spend talking about the subway.

  • There is a feeling, when you listen to radio, that it's one person, and they're talking to you, and you really feel their presence as one person.

  • The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

  • Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

  • You can criticize yourself to a point to do something better, or you criticize yourself to a point where you inhibit yourself.

  • Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

  • We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

  • What nobody tells people who are beginners"¦ is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not"¦ your taste is why your work disappoints you"¦ We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this"¦ It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

  • It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

  • Don't wait till you're older, or in some better job than you have now. Don't wait for anything. Don't wait till some magical...idea drops into your lap. That's not where ideas come from. Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.

  • You will be stupid. You will worry your parents. You will question your own choices, your relationships, your jobs, your friends, where you live, what you studied in college, that you went to college at all... If that happens, you're doing it right.

  • I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be.

  • I cannot stress enough that the answer to a lot of your life's questions is often in someone else's face. Try putting your iPhones down every once in a while and look at people's faces.

  • Everything is more compelling when you talk like a human being, when you talk like yourself.

  • ...these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

  • I think the thing that I wish somebody would ask me is just to ask about the business side of the radio show. I feel like I actually work very hard to make sure the business side of the radio show runs, and no one has any interest in how a public radio show is run. And rightly so.

  • I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.

  • You just have to fight your way through.

  • You will be fierce. You will fearless. And you will make work you know in your heart is not as good as you want it to be.

  • Honestly, I am so ignorant of how dance works that I cant even imagine a story that you would want to tell through movement.

  • I remember when I first got married, there was a certain amount of internet traffic on the subject of, "Who is this beard who is allegedly married to Ira Glass? Obviously, he's gay."

  • You'll hit gold more often if you simply try out a lot of things.

  • I remember clearly that when I was little it was explained to me [that] the way that babies were made was that God put the baby into some lady's stomach, right? And, at some point, I learned how it really happened, and really that was the beginning of the end of my belief in God. Up until that point, it had always been a really weird act of intervention on God's part.

  • Nobody tells people who are beginners - and I really wish somebody had told this to me - that all of us who do creative work... get into it because we have good taste.

  • It is only by going through a volume of work that... your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take awhile. It's normal to take awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through.

  • Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas.

  • The truth is, I just don't have that much time to see movies. So if I get two hours where I can actually see a film, I don't want to go backwards, I want to go forwards.

  • Honestly, there are so many things about structuring a story for film and telling a story for film that are really different from doing radio.

  • I wish that someone had said to me that it's normal to feel lost for a little while.

  • Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.

  • It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

  • In some theoretical way I know that a half-million people hear the show. But in a day-to-day way, there's not much evidence of it.

  • I just feel like there's so many movies I haven't seen that I want to see, that I would never go back to the same one. It's funny because all my friends, they have movies that they've seen over and over again.

  • I'm going to go with Chihuahua, just because I can't think of anything more frightening than a giant Chihuahua.

  • For people starting public radio shows, one of the things you have to do is you have to talk every single public radio station into picking you up.

  • For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It's a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person and things happen to them and then something big happens and they realize something new.

  • I played no sports well. Because I was a boy in the United States Of America, I was forced into Little League and played horrible Little League baseball, and played football and basketball in school situations where I was forced to.

  • I was a chubby, unathletic kid and conformed to every possible stereotype you could imagine of someone who would end up in public broadcasting.

  • I don't think I ever played any sports recreationally for my own pleasure. I was bad at them from the start.

  • Brad Pitt is so good-looking there's a lightbulb inside of him shooting good-looking-ness in all directions.

  • ...uncorny, human sized drama

  • I don't think I've ever stolen anything.

  • I think the most famous person I've ever met is Brad Pitt.

  • Brad Pitt is really game to talk about whatever and is really fun to talk to and was totally up for discussing anything.

  • Honestly, I don't see movies more than once.

  • I dont take care of my voice at all, which is one reason that I sound as bad as I do.

  • Just when did I get to the point when staying at a hotel wasn't fun?

  • Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.

  • I seen a pig so big it'd block out the sun.

  • Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.

  • If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get lucky.

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