Top 165 Quotes & Sayings by Ira Glass

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Ira Glass.

Last updated on December 3, 2024.

Ira Jeffrey Glass is an American public radio personality. He is the host and producer of the radio and television series This American Life and has participated in other NPR programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Talk of the Nation. His work in radio and television has won him awards, such as the Edward R. Murrow Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Radio and the George Polk Award in Radio Reporting.

American - Journalist | Born: March 3, 1959

Source: Wikipedia

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

Ira Glass

I've read the poker books, but at this point, everybody who's playing has read the poker books. I feel like I'm knowledgeable enough to understand what's going on in the game, and I understand why I suck. And I'm not sure if I'll ever rise beyond that to the level where I don't suck.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

I'm a cliche.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

I read the newspaper, but I live in my own little bubble.

Ira Glass

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.'

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

If you date one woman a year, times 10 years, and that's 10 women.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

The atheist market is a very overlooked and powerful market, it turns out.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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?

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

I'm in production year round. I work long hours. I have a dog and a wife. There's not a lot of available time for consuming any culture: T.V., movies, books. When I read, it's generally magazines, newspapers and web sites.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

I think stories get better the more people try to amuse themselves.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

I have been shocked at the number of people who don't watch television.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.'

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

I have a pit bull. He's a rescue. He's adorable.

Ira Glass

Top 165 Quotes & Sayings by Ira Glass

Related Authors