Top 100 Ira Glass Quotes
#1. But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.
Ira Glass
#2. 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.
Ira Glass
#3. 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.
Ira Glass
#4. 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
#5. In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.
Ira Glass
#6. 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.
Ira Glass
#7. 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
#8. I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.
Ira Glass
#9. I don't meet many people who are talking about shows on Showtime.
Ira Glass
#10. 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
#11. 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.
Ira Glass
#12. 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.
Ira Glass
#13. '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.
Ira Glass
#14. You can criticize yourself to a point to do something better, or you criticize yourself to a point where you inhibit yourself.
Ira Glass
#15. Generally the aesthetics of broadcast journalism seem to me to be incredibly primitive.
Ira Glass
#17. We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.
Ira Glass
#18. In radio, you have two tools. Sound and silence.
Ira Glass
#19. I wish that someone had said to me that it's normal to feel lost for a little while.
Ira Glass
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. The atheist market is a very overlooked and powerful market, it turns out.
Ira Glass
#23. You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.
Ira Glass
#24. I was a freelancer all through my 20s and was very slow to get good at what I did.
Ira Glass
#25. I read the newspaper, but I live in my own little bubble.
Ira Glass
#26. 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
#27. 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.
Ira Glass
#28. I have a pit bull. He's a rescue. He's adorable.
Ira Glass
#29. I can only control what I can control.
Ira Glass
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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.
Ira Glass
#33. 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.
Ira Glass
#34. 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
#35. Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.
Ira Glass
#36. 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.
Ira Glass
#37. You'll hit gold more often if you simply try out a lot of things.
Ira Glass
#38. 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
#39. If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get lucky.
Ira Glass
#40. You just want to try a bunch of stuff, because you don't know what's going to be great.
Ira Glass
#41. 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.
Ira Glass
#42. I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.
Ira Glass
#43. 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.
Ira Glass
#44. 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.
Ira Glass
#45. 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.
Ira Glass
#46. I think stories get better the more people try to amuse themselves.
Ira Glass
#47. Perfectionism: the need to be right instead of being right.
Ira Glass
#48. I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say.
Ira Glass
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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.
Ira Glass
#53. You just have to fight your way through.
Ira Glass
#54. Just when did I get to the point when staying at a hotel wasn't fun?
Ira Glass
#55. Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas.
Ira Glass
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. I eat the same breakfast and lunch every day, both at my desk. I employ no time-saving tricks at all.
Ira Glass
#59. 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
#60. Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.
Ira Glass
#61. 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
#62. When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
Ira Glass
#63. 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
#64. I don't take care of my voice at all, which is one reason that I sound as bad as I do.
Ira Glass
#65. I've never so appreciated what actors do and how strange it is.
Ira Glass
#66. I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.
Ira Glass
#67. 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
#68. 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.'
Ira Glass
#69. 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
#70. perfectionism is the need to be right instead of being liked
Ira Glass
#71. The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.
Ira Glass
#72. 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.
Ira Glass
#73. 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.
Ira Glass
#74. 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
#75. 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.
Ira Glass
#77. 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.
Ira Glass
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.
Ira Glass
#81. 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
#82. I seen a pig so big it'd block out the sun.
Ira Glass
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. I think people who live in New York don't realize just how much time they spend talking about the subway.
Ira Glass
#86. When you're working in public radio, you don't have any money to advertise.
Ira Glass
#87. 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.
Ira Glass
#88. Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.
Ira Glass
#89. 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?
Ira Glass
#90. 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
#91. The flakier your mission, the fiercer you have to be on the business side.
Ira Glass
#92. 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.
Ira Glass
#93. 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.
Ira Glass
#94. I feel like dance, by its nature, goes so easily to grand and beautiful.
Ira Glass
#95. Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.
Ira Glass
#96. If you date one woman a year, times 10 years, and that's 10 women.
Ira Glass
#97. Any story that I can consider worth telling is one that you could tell in words.
Ira Glass
#98. In general in New York, we all eat like kings. Insane quality, mind-blowing variety, at all price ranges.
Ira Glass
#99. I have been shocked at the number of people who don't watch television.
Ira Glass
#100. 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.
Ira Glass
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