Top 165 Quotes & Sayings by Ira Glass - Page 2

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.

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

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.

Radio is for driving.

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 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.

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.

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.

The flakier your mission, the fiercer you have to be on the business side.

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.

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 can only control what I can control.

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.

Generally the aesthetics of broadcast journalism seem to me to be incredibly primitive.

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.

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

Honestly, like, I'm a superfan of the 'New York Times,' but I know nothing about how they put it together, and I really don't care.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A lot of broadcasting, I think, is doing a tremendous amount of preparation and trying to act like, 'Oh, this thought is just occurring to me right now' - and speaking sincerely.

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.

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'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.

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.

I eat the same breakfast and lunch every day, both at my desk. I employ no time-saving tricks at all.

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.

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.'

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

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

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.

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 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 like excess. And giant M&M's.

I've never so appreciated what actors do and how strange it is.

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

I'm just not very funny.

Any story that I can consider worth telling is one that you could tell in words.

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.

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.

'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 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.

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

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

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

Not owning a car anymore, I feel like I'm barely an American. I miss it. And I barely ever get to listen to the radio in the car, which is the best place for radio.

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.

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.

Unless you work for '60 Minutes', your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result.

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

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

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

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

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.

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

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.

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