Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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, there are so many things about structuring a story for film and telling a story for film that are really different from doing radio.

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.

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.

I cannot stress enough that the answer to a lot of your life's questions is often in someone else's face. Try putting your iPhones down every once in a while and look at people's faces.

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.

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

I like excess. And giant M&M's.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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