Quotes from 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.

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?

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

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?

The truth is, I just don't have that much time to see movies. So if I get two hours where I can actually see a film, I don't want to go backwards, I want to go forwards.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.