Words matter. These are the best Ira Glass Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’m a reporter – if I don’t interview someone, I don’t have much to say, and I definitely can’t just sit down and knock out 800 words on any subject you give me.
I suppose I shouldn’t go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio. 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 didn’t watch T.V. from the time I was 18 ’til my mid-30s. And then I got a T.V. to watch ‘The Sopranos.’ I realized, ‘Oh, T.V. is really interesting.’
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.
Like most people in radio – and in magic – I’m not cool. I know people who are hip, and I can feel distance between them and me.
I don’t think I’m better than everyone else at anything, but I am very quick at organizing a big mass of interview tape into a structure.
When I started ‘This American Life’, one of the reactions I got was, ‘When is the adult going to show up who will host the show?’ At some point, people just got used to it.
Any story that I can consider worth telling is one that you could tell in words.
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.
Writing is just very difficult. I’m an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best.
I liked the people at Brown, while I really disliked most of the fellow students I had met at Northwestern.
You get into this situation, performing for T.V., where you have to speak with utter sincerity. It’s just like the radio. You have to say it like you mean it, even though the thing you’re saying is actually planned out.
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.’
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 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.
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.
I don’t take care of my voice at all, which is one reason that I sound as bad as I do.
I don’t meet many people who are talking about shows on Showtime.
In general in New York, we all eat like kings. Insane quality, mind-blowing variety, at all price ranges.
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.
Radio is for driving.
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. But a lot of effective and interesting radio is based on one character who reacts to the world.
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.
There is a kind of structure for a story that was peculiarly compelling for the radio. I thought I had invented it atom-by-atom sitting in an editing booth in Washington on M Street when I was in my 20s. Then I found out that it is one of the oldest forms of telling a story – it was the structure of a sermon.
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.
Unless you work for ’60 Minutes’, your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result.
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.
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.
If you want somebody to tell you a story, one of the most easiest and effective ways is if you’re telling them a story.
I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say.
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.
I can only control what I can control.
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.
I’ve actually done events at radio stations where I feel like I’ve had to give a little talk in behalf of television as a medium.
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.
If you date one woman a year, times 10 years, and that’s 10 women.
Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.
In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.
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 feel like, in general in my work life, my main goal has been to just be in a situation where I’m not bored with my job. That’s been the entire principle. Got my wish.
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.
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.
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 have been shocked at the number of people who don’t watch television.
My first job on the radio was writing jokes for a Baltimore DJ called Johnny Walker, who was sort of a ’70s era shock jock who all the teenage boys listened to in my school.
The flakier your mission, the fiercer you have to be on the business side.
I feel like dance, by its nature, goes so easily to grand and beautiful.
I think the name of the show, ‘This American Life’ – we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don’t think about whether it’s an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal.
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 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.
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.
But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.
When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
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.
I remember that in Baltimore, where I grew up, we would drive by the radio station and tower of WBAL, and I would try to picture the people inside and what they did there.
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.
I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.
You’d think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.
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