Quotes from Ira Glass

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

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.

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.

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'm a cliche.

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

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.

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

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.